"I know not whether it is with thee an old story, that daughters tell their mothers every truth and all secrets; to me it is something new, and only one best daughter, Beata, can do it.
"A fortnight ago I recollected a fault of hers not so faintly as to-day, and it is this--that she has too little pleasure in--pleasure, and too much in mournful fancies. There are souls of too great tenderness, that can never be happy (as well as never feel offended) without weeping, and who receive a great piece of good fortune, a great kindness, with a sighing bosom. But when such come into the presence of coarse natures, that cannot guess the hidden gratitude and the dumb joy, they are forced to assume hypocritically not the feeling but the expression of it. Beata's father demands for every present he makes, whose value he weighs even to an apothecary's grain, an exultant and exuberant joy; she, on the contrary, at most, does not feel one till some time after; the apparition of one or another light streak of fortune sends a gleam all at once out over the whole line of her sad days, which lie like graves in her memory. In this Beata I also notice, what I have often before, that woman's body and soul are too tender and excitable, too fine and too fiery for intense intellectual exertion, and that both need, to sustain them, the constant diversion of household labor; the superior women are less injured by diet than by their eccentric sensibilities, which drive their nerves like silver wire through smaller and smaller holes, and thin them out from vermicelli into geometrical lines. A woman, if she had the fiery soul of a Schiller, and should compose therewith one of his pieces, would in the fifth act herself die with the hero.
"I understand thy amorous interrogating articles very well: it is true, the Privy-legation-counsellor von Oefel is a frequent visitor here. He seems, indeed, to have no more tender business here than mercantile, and not to require anything ordered by the commercial agent, except pepper for Ceylon and nutmegs for Sumatra, consequently least of all his daughter and her goods. It is also true that the minister's lady, that toll-and-alms-box of male hearts, forms one of the party, and has Oefel's heart already hooked or eyed to her charms; but the devil trust privy-legation-counsellors, especially Oefels. I tell thee, whether he entrap Beata or not, in either case I wonder at it. Thou wilt, of course, console thyself with this, dear Jean Paul, that, in the first place, thou hast greater attractions than he, and secondly, art quite unconscious of having these attractions, which, in conversation, has a great effect. There may well be something in it; for Oefel aims not so much to please, as merely to show that he could please (if he pleased), and he therefore allows himself all sorts of whims, merely that one may have something to blame and to forgive and he something to make good; he is also--for a courtier and a diamond must have, beside hardness, pure colorlessness in order to reflect foreign hues and lights more faithfully--he is too vain even for a courtier, and buys with another's favor only his own. I will console thee with still more 'it is true's' before I bring on my 'buts.' Beata, it is true, looks as if she were asking herself every minute, why do I not admire him? the minster's lady looks as if she were asking her every minute, 'why dost thou not envy me, when my vassal is like myself a piano-forte with a hundred stops and pedals?'--for he keeps no one position and can venture into any one; every movement seems to flow from the other; his soul changes its positions as playfully as his body, and bends over as gracefully as a fountain in the wind to the remotest matters; nothing confuses him, but he every one; he knows a hundred exordiums to one sermon, begins for the sake of beginning, breaks off for the sake of breaking off, and knows no more than his hearers what he is after--in short, he is a rival, dear Paul!--I can now properly introduce the promised But.
"But although my fair patient overlooks him so coldly, as one who is trying on us a dress, he, however, assumes the opposite, and throws at her fire-balls to illuminate himself, and aeolypiles or smoke-balls for her obscuration, and is already, in advance, cutting mint-stamps for his future medals of victory. Men or manikins like Oefel have such a superfluity of truth, that they are obliged to give it not to one alone, but to distribute it among a thousand women; Oefel would fain command a whole female slave-ship; meanwhile he cares as little about thee as about the minister's lady, who loves him, because it is her latest lover, and whom he loves, first, because in her triumphal chariot, to which formerly a number of ninnies were harnessed, he would be glad to draw alone as thill-horse; and, secondly, she possesses more art and less feeling than he, and persuades him that it is precisely the reverse.
"That I may now weave our Beata, whom thou wouldst gladly get into thy life and into thy book, into the life and the book of Oefel (he is upon me also), for this reason, dear Paul, I have delivered so many cabinet-sermons to old Röper to the point that the sickliness of his daughter is to be overcome not by one but by several hundred physicians, i. e., by society--that the old man will give her a society or rather will give her to one, without himself giving her the necessary alimony. He wants to transplant her into some bed or other of the court-garden: 'She, too, shall, with the rest, gain knowledge of the world,' he says, and has none himself. He would, if he could, drag and crush down the whole female world from its altars and pedestals and presidential chairs and regular seats to milking-stools and work-benches and foot-stools; nevertheless his own daughter shall have Jews and diamond-dust grind facettes and angles of radiance upon her, which he himself hates. Once at court, the legation-counsellor will see her every day--and Jean Paul is nowhere.
"This Jean Paul asked me in a sly way, whether he might not act as lawyer to the father of the aforesaid daughter, because he, said Jean, had heard of the resignation of the present one. Herr Kolb, however (the lawyer in question), is still there, and still quarrelling; says every week: 'If every one knew the tricks of Röper's that I know;' while Röper says every week: 'If every one knew the tricks of Kolb's that I know;' and so the two are glued together by mutual apprehensions. Besides, just now, the thing is not to be thought of; for in fourteen days old Röper receives the oath of allegiance from his manor. A miser dreads to change or to risk anything.
"Why dost thou let thy good sister stay so long in the arsenical fumes of the court? Is what she can gain there worth as much as what she brings with her and may lose there, her pure, tender, though volatile heart? On my tours I thought otherwise, but now in solitude, a coquettish insect, a coquet-crab, creeping now forward and now backward, that keeps opening her great and little shears and always reproduces them as fast as one tear's them off, who instead of a heart carries in her breast a stomach, and yet, like all insects, is cold-blooded, such an incrusted female crab is more revolting to me than a shelless one in the moulting period of sensibility, which is too soft, and out of which romance-writers make the delicate crab-butter. Sensibility improves with years, coquetry grows worse with years. Why dost thou not take thy Philippina home? To these questions Jean Paul has vouchsafed no answer; but to his I have; for I do not take vengeance; I could wish rather the said Paul were pressing Beata's fingers to-day on wrong fingers rather than on the right keys, and that now in the spring-time of her years she looked round beseechingly beside the piano toward Paulus and illumined him with the heaven of her broad blue eyes; the poor devil, even this Paul, would no longer know himself, and would say: Without a beautiful eye, for all other beauty I would not give a doit, much less myself; but for a pair of heavenly eyes I forget all contiguous charms and all contiguous faults, and all Bach and Benda, what they are, and my mordants and the false fifths and much more. Farewell, forgetful one! Dr. Fenk."
We understand each other, hearty friend! whoever has once written satires himself can forgive all satires upon himself, especially the most malicious, only not dull ones. But, though the doctor has carried on the fight in jest, still I must inform such readers as reside at a distance from Scheerau, without reference to myself, that the aforesaid Legation-counsellor, Oefel, is the most insignificant fellow that either of us has ever known; is one who is only less embarrassed among women, but always so among men, and in a small circle far more than in a large one, not to say that he is always seeking and hunting after that attention which modest people carefully shun, namely, general attention. If he succeeds in getting this elsewhere, he shall not have it in my book.... The following case is, to be sure, impossible, especially on account of the cursed long- and short-legged or trochaic supports and consoles on which my torso rests; but still a man can picture to himself the impossible case, which is this, that I should one day appear before my Beata with a declaration of love, and so, contrary to my own expectation, be myself the hero of this biography and she the heroine. I am regularly dumfounded, for what I would be really saying and supposing is that I became Röper's lawyer, and next thing, in fact, (for I should be every court-day "sweet," or a sweet creature, as a woman expresses herself, who belongs more to the fair than to the weaker sex) absolutely his son-in-law. With pleasure would I, for the good and sympathetic reader's gratification, describe all biographically.... But as has been said, the thing is, unluckily, quite impossible, so far as I can see into the future; and this merely by reason of a cursed unsymmetrical wire-pedestal, which, to be sure, he whom his ill-fortune has fastened thereto would fain make good by a thousand glazings and rasures, and on which Epictetus likewise for a long time stood.
In the heat of my feelings I have been carried quite out of my biographical plan; it was hitherto to have been cleverly kept from the reading world (and the thing was successfully done) that none of all these adventures are yet old, and that in a short time the life of these persons will go on hand in hand simultaneously with my biography. But now I have fired off all my powder. On the whole a new section must, now be commenced, that shall contain more sense....