The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

In these short marriages the great folk do, perhaps, many a good thing, which moralists too easily overlook, who would rather fill their printed pages than their birth-lists. Like young authors, young grandees let their first copies appear anonymously or under borrowed names, and I can add nothing to Montesquieu's observation, that the giving of names benefits population, because every one strives to propagate his own, except my own remark, that namelessness helps it still better. In fact, it holds in this respect with the most exalted persons, as with the Greek artists, who, under the finest statues with which their hand decorated temples and roads, were not allowed to place their patronymic; while the cunning Phidias also finds his imitators, who instead of his name foisted in on the statue of Minerva his old face.

The Prince had in his mind to offer Beata, who seemed to him to have too much innocence and too little coquetry, a short love. Her resistance led him to think of a longer. Under the eyes of the Resident Lady all her senses were secured against him, only not the ear; in the park, none of them. The Resident Lady--who knew that her spirit could for every moment transfer itself into a new body, while her rival had no more than one, in which, moreover, was lodged nothing but innocence and love--looked upon the whole affair with no other than satirical eyes. So far had things gone when the Prince in the dog-day interregnum arrived, and the next morning, instead of the sceptre had in his hand nothing but the frizzling-comb and the Resident Lady's head. He had established it as a fashion at his court, every chamberlain down to the court-dentist had thenceforth his prèteuse de tête, in order to learn as much upon her head, as he would have to practice upon the head of a fairer prèteuse. It was as necessary for one to frizzle as to be frizzled.

I might say it in a note, that a prèteuse de tête in Paris is a damsel who is frizzled a hundred times in a day, because the fraternity would learn the art by her--it is impossible that so many changes and trials should go on under her skull as over it--the coalition and affiliation of the most unlike frisures is so great, combings and curlings follow each other so swiftly, or building up and tearing down, that only on the head of the Goddess of Truth can it fare worse, which the philosophers frizzle and fix up, or in whole bodies politic, upon which regents practice.

On the same morning when ours frizzled the Resident Lady, he said to the dreamy Beata that the next day he was coming with the friseur to her. The Resident Lady said nothing but "the men can do anything; but seldom what is easy: they can more easily entangle ten law-suits than ten hairs." Beata could not speak, at night she could not sleep. Her whole soul curdled with horror at the Prince's frosty face and stinging fiery glance, which (however little she entertained the thought distinctly) burned to abridge the preliminary victories in the new palace, just as if he were in the Palais Royal. The next morning her wish to be sick had almost grown into the conviction that she was so. She looked with life-weary vacancy out of the window into the Still Land in which two children of the court-gardener were rolling round a variegated glass-ball, when the canary bird who lived on the shoulders of the Prince, and flew round him like a fly, came fluttering from his head, which was separated from her by six windows, and alighted upon hers. She drew in her head with the bird--but with the proprietor of the creature also, who came up to her at once without ceremony and said: "With you one is fated to lose--but from my bird you cannot take away--liberty;" for people of his sort let all this slip out without accent; they speak in the same tone of the starry canopy and of the coach canopy, and of the motion of both.

Without ceremony he was about to put on her the powder-mantle; she took it however and put it on herself with other purposes and said she was already dressed for the whole day, even to powdering. Only she would fain still invest her refusals in the fairest forms, which her station and the respect for his sex, to which her mother had trained her, dictated; in the end she saw that his remonstrances were not much better than his hair-dressing. When he began this latter, and stood so close to her, she then, again, perceived the opposite. Every hair upon her head grew to a feeler, and it seemed to her as if he touched her sore nerves, as if, with him, a flaming hell traveled round her. All at once, according to the laws of the female nature, her agony welled up from the middle stage to the highest--I should be glad to know, whether it arose from his assumed attitudes, which availed him nothing, or from a kiss, as the receipt of the benefit-play which he was performing for his advantage, or from her glance at the pyramid of the hermitage-mountain, which filled to overflowing her trembling bosom with the mental and material images of her brother--suffice it, she sprang up feverishly, and after saying: "She had promised the Resident Lady so faithfully to help her put on her hat, and now she was still here!" she certainly expected that this modestly-formed rebuke would drive him away. He was not to be driven away. This disappointment shattered her tender forces and she leaned, trembling, her arm and frizzled head against the arras. He, perhaps, tired of waiting, or glad to have accustomed her to his neighborhood, took his bird and her and led her himself to the Resident Lady's; here he repeated with her his laughter at the benefit-play, and so on.

Meanwhile the torments of the outer head had resolved themselves into the migraine of the inner; she stayed away from the table and--so long as he remained there this time--from the park also.

Which latter was not so much to be stated as to be explained.

TWENTY-EIGHTH, OR SIMON AND JUDAS, SECTION.

Paintings.--Resident Lady.

Day before yesterday (the 26th of October) was thy baptismal day, Amandus! Hast thou, haply, in all thy life, ever celebrated one with glad eyes? Hast thou ever, at the end of a year, said: May the new one be like this?--I will not answer these questions, lest I should make myself more sad....