So far Fenk, who could bear all men, but no monster, no skinflint, I have secured this imperfect character for my biography (for he himself exists even biographically under the name of Röper); besides there is a remarkable deficiency here in genuine knaves; nay, if I should compare even Röper with the devils of the Epic Poets and myself with the Poets themselves, neither of us would look very big.
If my readers had a letter of Dr. Fenk's, excusing his former severity--which reminded us of Scheerau, of the Doctor and of a person very dear to me, and which fits in exactly with the whole narrative--they would insert this letter also in the biography. I have that same letter and the same privilege, and splice it in here:
Fenk to Me.
"Accept the poor bearer of this as your client; the Maussenbacher has screwed on to the poor devil his suction-works and quite exhausted him, and now leaves him in the lurch. None of all the knaves and advocates in Scheerau will serve him as patrons against a rich nobleman, for they wish to get the latter one day as their own.
"I am myself, indeed, daily in Maussenbach, and pleading; but the niggard accepts no disinterested arguments; and for all else Röper has feeling and reason. There will yet come a time when one will find it as hard to comprehend our past stupidity, as we our future wisdom: I mean, when one will be unable to tolerate, not merely, as now, any beggars, but even any millionaires.
"Of the father of a beautiful daughter one constrains himself to think well. I force myself to do so, too: in thy piano-pupil Beata, thou sawest only the green leaves under the bud; now thou mightest see the opening rose-leaves themselves and the fragrant nimbus around them. Such a daughter of such a father! In other words: the rose blooms upon a black web of root-fibres sucking in nourishment from a filthy soil.
"I am here for the purpose of curing her: the old man will have something for his money; but in Maussenbach no one reflects on a saying of the Abbe Galiani, who was buried four days before I left Italy, that women are perpetual patients. Merely, however, in the nerves: the most sensitive are the most sickly; the most rational or the coldest are the healthiest. If I were a prince, I would make a princely resolution, and in a rescript from my most illustrious hand would make it a case of house-arrest, if a woman drank so much as a single spoonful of medicine. You poor misguided creatures, why have you in general so much confidence in us men, and us doctors in particular, as to be pleased that we, tapping the glasses of physic one after another in the medicine-chest, take you to drive in a medicine-carriage until we transfer you to the carriage that bears you on your last journey?... So have I said to them many a time, and each time they have only taken the more willingly all the medicines I prescribed for them.
"The only kind of medicine that helps women more than it hurts them is certainly dress. According to many naturalists the life of birds is lengthened by moulting, and that of women, too, I add; for they are always ailing until they have on a new plumage. This is not easy to explain on therapeutic principles, but it is true; and the more distinguished one is, consequently the more sickly, the oftener is he obliged to moult, as the swamp-salamander also sheds his skin every five days. A female crab, waiting for a new shell, cuts an awkward figure in her hole. Every poison can become an antidote, and it is certain that clothes can give sicknesses, e. g., hectic, plague, etc.; so must they, under the direction of a sensible physician, be able to remove sicknesses. An enlightened Medicus will, in my opinion, if Halle's domestic dispensary, i. e., the wardrobe, fails to give relief, take his recipes from no other dispensary than the Auerbach cellar in Leipsic. As thou canst therewith fly to the help of many a fair invalid, I will furnish thee out of my materia medica the following medicinal neckerchiefs, dresses, etc.
"For steel-medicines: steel-rosettes, and steel-chains.
"The precious stones which were formerly supplied from apothecaries' shops are even now good to be used outwardly.