The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

In the first place, it is true, I am a year behind Gustavus's life; but I think in eight weeks to have written up to it. I expected, indeed, half a year ago, that now I should overtake him; but a life is easier to lead than to picture, especially in a good style. On the whole an author--a good one--can more easily reckon the stars in heaven than his future sheets, which are also stars. Finally, one expects that the Literary Times will consider at least so much as this, that I, as a counsellor-at-law, cannot possibly write so much for it as for whole colleges, faculties, and supreme courts of the empire. Is the Literary Times aware of the terrible amount of my labors? One should have seen my cupboard full of professional papers, whereon, moreover, not a word is yet written, because I have only just received them from the paper-mill; or one should have been in my judicial district of Schwenz, where the twelve subjects and the feudal lord and judge are themselves peasants, in order to require of me nothing more than a book a year. Where is the lawyer throughout all Scheerau, who serves in a suit, that might shortly--for the devil must have his sport--have been made to stretch out through the Wetzlar gate under the session table of the imperial chancery, which knows all about good style? And yet the suit, like Peter the Great, served from below upward, and mounted, like the sect of Stylites, higher and higher seats.

Secondly, unless this is still firstly, I can, consequently, like the Jews, only on the Sabbath, or Sunday, think upon the plastic of my spiritual embryos; on week days nothing is written, except, to be sure, biographies also, but only those of rogues, by which is meant protocols and accusatory libels.

Secondly (or thirdly), I am the inmate of a schoolmaster's establishment. The good Captain, when his son was out of his door, undertook to put me under personal arrest, which in my case includes also real arrest, because my real estate consists of my body, and my personal property of my soul; he said I should stay in his palace and advocate and satirize as long as I pleased. It were to be wished his old judge would fade away, then I should be the new one, for his good heart--which my knavish one, accustomed to court subtleties, cannot always forgive for its want of them--cannot bear to dismiss anybody. Still keep thy sound north-east breath; still keep those hands of thine with their cudgelling-stick of a woe-unto-thee! and thy tongue, with its two or three thunders! and thousand devils! my Falkenberg!

And I stayed with him through the winter; but early in the spring of this year I moved down to the place where I now write--in the upper chamber of the Auenthal schoolmaster, Sebastian Wutz.[^[55]] I had, perhaps, the three weightiest reasons in the world for this step; in the first place, nowhere do I feel so shrivelled up as in a Vatican full of dreary caverns, in Sahara wastes of empty apartments; a dining-hall with its poverty of furniture is to me a Patmos, and only in little snug sitting-rooms does one feel enlarged. Man should from year to year creep into smaller and smaller cells, until he slips into the smallest, i. e., into the narrowest hole of this compressed silver wire ["silver cord">[.

The second reason was, Herr Fortins (in Morhof. Poly hist., L. II., c. 8), who advises literary men to change their towns every half-year,--and, in fact, one does write better after any change, and though it were only that of a writing-desk. Without such freshening of the air the soul writes itself so deeply into its narrow pass that it is caught there without being able to see sky or earth. The present work may, perhaps, come to something; but every month and every section I must write in a different cabin.

The third and soundest reason is my sister. She has come back again from the Resident Lady von Bouse's, because she had to vacate her place for a fair book-patient, namely, the good Beata, whom father, doctor, lover--the stupid Oefel (but he finds not the least favor)--have at last tempted into this confluence of all enjoyments and visitings. Secondly, my sister is here, because I would so have it; but Sister, Sister, why did not I snatch thee sooner out of this overrunning mineral-whirlpool? Why hast thou so changed? Who can change thee back again? Who will wipe out of thy heart thy thoughts that forever recur to strange glances; thy eagerness to be admired but not loved; thy coquetry, which seeks only to excite love, not to reciprocate it, and all that distinguishes thy heart from thy former heart and from the unchangeable heart of Beata? I would not, therefore, with my sister, make the palace narrower, where, besides, she already, every day, sits away two or three hours.

I have now explained to the reader what he is about. We return to Gustavus's carriage, and are all satisfied--reader, printer and writer.

Gustavus, in an intoxication of sorrow, which the lovely heavens dissolved in tears, drove on to Scheerau, and counted every bee and every swallow that flew towards our palace, happy. The next ten years hung down like ten dark curtains before him. "And," he asked himself, "do skeletons, wild beasts, or paradises lie behind the curtains?" The thing which, without curtain, sat before him and lectured, he did not see--namely, the Professor. Two leagues this side of Scheerau he wrote to me with that flaming gratitude which breaks forth from a man so radiantly only in his second decade. As in the case of all souls which alter more from within outwardly than from without inward, the barometer of the heart stood within him, often immovable at the same degree. The rain-clouds and the rainbow in his inner heaven he carried with him to Scheerau; he bore his veiled heart into the wide, echoing cadet barracks, into the fair-day-tumult on its stairs, and into the noise of watchwords, as if into the midst of the hammerings of a copper foundry and a fulling mill. He grew still sadder, but more painfully so.

The remarkable thing in the chamber which he entered and was to occupy, was not the presence of three cadets--for they were current men, small change and prosaic souls, i. e., jolly, witty, devoid of feeling, without interest in higher wants, and of moderate passions--but it was the Ephorus of the chambers, Herr von Oefel, who skipped about with his sword at his side like an impaled fly with his needle. Oefel began at once to observe him in order to describe him at evening; but in company he observed everybody, not in order to overhear others' tricks, but to exhibit his own. So, too, he praised without esteeming, and blackened without hating. He wanted merely to shine.

Amidst these circumstances, before Gustavus made the heavy passage through sorrows to occupations, a solace came to him in the form of memory, and he saw, what he should not have forgotten--his Amandus, his childhood's friend. But the good youth came before him not in his first form of a blind boy, but in his last, of a dying man. He had a nervous consumption, which had sucked all the pith out of the still standing bark of the tree of life. On the bark there lingered no green save hanging twigs with pale drooping foliage. He was preparing himself for no office or life, but was expecting and stood ready to receive at the threshold of the hereditary sepulchre Death coming up the steps. But that his soul lay in a living wound[^[56]]--there is nothing in that to surprise us except his sex; for the fairest female souls seldom live otherwise; but men do not spare such wound; the spectacle does not soften them towards so soft a sex, that most of them live, not from day to day, but from sorrow to sorrow and from tear to tear....