The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

For some days the von Bouse was not accessible, when the original wanted to carry her his copy. At last she sent for both. His face was very unlike the painted one, when his glance, on entering, fell upon his physiognomical sister, who was singing with her little Bouse at the harpsichord, upon Beata. We poor devils, we who have grown up not on family trees, but on a family bush, are brought by four walls so near to each other, that we make each other warm; on the contrary, the velveted walls of the great keep their inmates as far apart as city walls, and it is with us there as in taverns, where our interest detaches only one or more from the great mass. So Beata kept on; and he began; to him it was no more than if he saw her through his window in the garden. His portrait found the most favorable reviewer. She flew on with it through several rooms. Gustavus could now set his eyes where his ears had long since been. His only wish was, that the pupil were extraordinarily stupid and sang everything falsely, merely that the charming leader might the oftener recite her part. It was that divine Idolo del mio of Rust's, at hearing which I and my acquaintance always feel as if we were absorbed by the bland heaven of Italy, and dissolved by the waves of the tones, and inhaled as a breath by the Donna who glides along in the same gondola with us under the starry sky.... By such dangerous fancies I really upset all my stoicism and become, even before I am yet thirty, eighteen years old.

So much the more easily can I conceive how it was with young Gustavus, who had his eyes and ears so near to the magnetic sun. Verily, I would a thousand times rather (I know right well what I undertake) drive all through Scheerau with the loveliest woman in the whole principality and lift her not only into, but even (what is far more dangerous) out of the carriage. Nay, more: sooner would I read to her with an impassioned voice the best we have in the poetic and romantic departments--yea, I would sooner dance with her at a masquerade ball out of one hall into another, and as we sit down ask her if she is happy--and finally (I cannot express it more strongly), I would sooner put on a doctor's hat and fasten her faint hand with mine to the bleeding-stand, while she, in order not to see the stream of blood leap over the snowy arm, gazes with her pale face steadily into my eye--sooner, I promise, will I (to be sure I shall get more and deeper wounds than the little bled-manikin in the calendar) do all this than hear the loveliest girl sing; then I should be melted and gone; who would help me, who would hear my signals of distress, when in the most tranquil attitude she let the snow of her right arm fall softly over some black surface or other, half opened the bud of her rose-lips, let her dew-distilling eyes fall upon--her thoughts and sink therein, when the soft downy bosom[^[69]] lay heaving like a white rose-leaf on the waves of the breath, and rose and fell with them; when her soul, otherwise wrapt in the threefold clothing of words, of body and of dress, unwound itself out of all wrappages and plunged into the waves of melody and sank in the sea of longing...? I should leap after her.----

Gustavus was caught in the very act of leaping after her, when the Resident Lady came back with two portraits. "Which is the more like?" she said to Beata, and held up both before her and fixed her eyes not upon the three faces which were to be compared, but upon the comparing one. The companion-piece was, namely, the lost one of the real brother, about which Beata had written to my Philippina. "O my brother!" said she with too much emotion and accent (which is pardonable, as she had just come from the harpsichord): and as she hastily snatched it, she screamed out, until her eye had accidentally glided down over the back of the picture and found no name there. Upon such particles of earthly dust often hangs the beating of the human heart: it hears and lifts the hundred-weight pressure of the whole atmosphere of life, but under the sultry breath of a social embarrassment it collapses in impotence. He who has not where to lay his head, suffers often less pain than he who has not where to lay his--hand.

"I thought your brother was a distant relative of yours," said the Resident Lady with perhaps a malicious double meaning, in order to entangle her in the choice of one or another sense. Certainly the Resident Lady had so readily at her command all words, ideas and limbs, that in Gustavus's and Beata's understanding and virtue, force hardly availed, as in mechanics, to supply the place of velocity. But Beata steadily related, without extenuation and without extravagance, all about these pictures which the reader has learned from my mouth. Gustavus could not have delivered such a narrative. The information, how it had come into the hands of the Resident Lady, the Resident Lady forgot to give, because she knew a hundred answers to it; Beata forgot to demand it, because she remarked the same thing.

"For your face,"--she said in the gayest tone, in which, without hesitation, she said the good about her charms, which others said in serious tones--"I could give you no other than my own; but that I must send with the garden to my brother in Saxony--you can paint it in with the park, so that both pieces may have one master." It is much harder to refuse anything to the jocose tone than to the serious--or at most it can be done only in a tone of pleasantry; but for this all the proper chords in Gustavus had been broken. Beata had not understood the allusion to the park; Bouse brought the whole landscape-drawing and asked her what pleased her most. She was for the shadow-realm and the evening-dell. (Why did she leave out the hermitage-mountain?) "But of the persons in the garden?"--she continued (the poor subject of inquisition fixed her still gaze more steadily on the evening dell)--"particularly the fair Venus here in the evening-dell?" At last she was obliged to speak, and said, without embarrassment: "The sculptor will not have to complain of the painter, but perhaps the painter will of the sculptor; perhaps, too, it is merely the frost that has injured this Venus a little." The Resident Lady, by her laughter and her witty glances at Gustavus, made a bonmot out of this, made her a little red, him fiery-red, her by this last again redder, and completely so by the answer: "So would my brother also think if he should get the Venus in this way; but you will do me the favor, my love, also to sit to the gentleman, our painter here, then there will come into our park a fairer Venus. I am in earnest. The two coming mornings you will give to our faces, Mr. von Falkenberg!" The good girl was silent. Gustavus, who had already consented to duplicate with his pencil Bouse's countenance, came within a hair of breaking out with the remark that he could not copy Beata's in connection with his. Fortunately it occurred to him that she would be dressed for the table.

(On Sunday, a week hence, I must begin my section with "For"----.)

TWENTY-NINTH, OR XXIII TRINITATIS, SECTION.

The Minister's Lady and her Fainting-fits--and so forth.

For it was only in the forenoon that he was in that green vault which contained Scheerau's greatest beauties--in the Bouse's apartment; in the afternoon and later the rivers of pleasure roared through it, poured out by the Naiads of pleasure from their chalices of joy. Half the court drove out thither from Scheerau. The court, as is well known, while the people have only Sabbath days, has whole Sabbatical years, and the nearer ministers of the court are distinguished from the ministers of the State in this, that they do no work whatever; so, too, in ancient times, only those beasts were laid upon the altars as offerings to the gods, which had never yet labored. I know full well, that more than one requires of the paralytic great world a certain labor, namely that of amusing itself and others in one continued stretch; but this is so herculean a task and so severely strains all the faculties, that it is enough if they collectively after a fête, on driving off in the morning dissemble and say, as they part from one another, or the next day on meeting each other: "After all we spent a delicious evening, and altogether things were so brilliant!" Great Quarto-Theologians have long since proved that Adam before the fall took no pleasure in eating or other enjoyments--our grandees before their fall are just as badly off and go through all these things in their state of innocence without having the least fun out of them. I wish I could help the Court.

A man who has a stated working-hour (and though it were only thirty minutes long) regards himself as more industrious than one who has just this day interrupted his twelve hours'-stint for thirty minutes. Oefel reproached himself for his overstrained exertion, and said he knew not how to excuse himself for writing one full hour every morning at the "Grand Sultan." Not till after that were the serious occupations of the day at an end; then for the first time he had himself frizzled and powdered, in order to flutter round as a day-butterfly before all toilet-mirrors; on the flowery head of the Defaillante (so the Minister's Lady was called) he alighted. There he let himself a second time be frizzled and be plumed, in order as a well-powdered twilight-and-night-butterfly to sweep round among the counters and show-dishes and their counterparts. I should not have happened upon this simile, had not his hair dressed for the evening in the shape of a horn and drawn up together into a capsule led me to think of the caterpillars of the night-butterflies, which have a horn or queue attached to them on behind--the day-caterpillars have nothing on them, just as his abbreviated stuck-up morning-hair required, in order to bear out their mutual resemblance.