As I have named the Minister's Lady the Defaillante, and as one might on the whole give her credit for the simplicity of being more faithful to the Counsellor of Legation than he was to her, I will tell the whole story and speak in her behalf. Vanity, which ruled over him as a limited monarch, held over her an unlimited monarchy--she had and made Italian verses, epigrams and all things belonging to the fine arts, and it is town-talk that, inasmuch as she had ceased to belong to fine Nature, she threw herself into the works of the fine arts, and from a model exalted herself by paint into a picture, by pantomime, into an actress by swooning into a statue.
This last is the cardinal-point--she died weekly and oftener, like every true Christian woman, not for the sake of her chastity, but even before her chastity; I mean a minute or two--she and her virtue swooned one after the other. If I am not copious on such a subject, I am not worth cutting a pen, and the deuce may take my productions. Virtue then, fared as badly with the Minister's Lady as a favorite young cat with a child. I will not speak of seasons of the day--but only of days of the week: I will suppose that on each day a different antichrist and arch-enemy of her virtue had, for visiting-card, sent his person: in that case it might have run somewhat thus: On Monday her virtue was in the beaming new moon for Herrn von A.,--on Tuesday, in full-moon for Herrn von B., who said: Between her and a Dèvote the only difference was age,--on Wednesday, in the last quarter for Herrn von C., who says: "je la touche dè'já," namely her arm,--on Thursday in the first quarter for Herrn von D., who says: "peutétre que"--and so on with the remaining enemies throughout the week; for each adversary saw on her, as his own rainbow, his own virtue. Honor and virtue were with her no empty words, but signified (quite in opposition to the school of Kant) the interval of time between her No and her Yes,--often merely the interval of space. I said above, she always had a swoon, when it was the Monday of her virtue. But this admits an explanation: her body and her virtue were born on the same day and of the same mother, and are true twins, like the brothers Castor and Pollux. Now the first, like Castor, is human and mortal, and the other, like Pollux, divine and immortal, and as that mythological brotherhood by a cunning device went halves in mortality and immortality, so as to share each other's society for a while, dead, and again for a while, living this cunning trick is repeated by her body and her virtue: both always die simultaneously, in order afterward to come to life again together. The artistic dying of such ladies may be regarded, on still another side: Such a woman can experience a joy over the strength and the proofs of her virtue, which may reach even the point of a swoon; moreover, a grief at the sufferings and defeats of the same, which may also amount to a swoon. Now one can imagine, whether under the combined attacks of two emotions, each of which alone may be mortal, a woman can still remain erect. Notoriously the honor of women of the world dies as little as the King of France, and that is a well-known fiction; at least the death of that honor is, like that of the Saints, a sleep which does not last over 12 hours. I know at one Court a kind of honor or virtue, which, like a polypus, nothing can kill: like the ancient Gods, it may be wounded, but not annihilated--like the horn-beetle it continues to writhe and wriggle on the needle and without any nourishment. Naturalists of rank often inflict upon such a virtue, as Fontana did to the infusoria, a thousand torments, under which citizenly female virtue would instantly give up the ghost,--not a bit! no thought of dying. It is a beneficent arrangement of Nature that precisely in the higher class of ladies virtue has such an Achillean power of life or of regeneration, that it may, in the first place, the more easily endure the simple and compound fractures, bone-shatterings and amputations, and generally the battlefield of that rank. Secondly, that those ladies (in reliance upon the immortality and long line of life belonging to their virtue) may need to set to their pleasures, whose physical limits are, besides, so narrow, at least no moral ones.
I come back to the virtuous swoons or erotic dying of the Minister's Lady; I will not, however, confine myself to remarking that as the ancient philosophy was the art of learning how to die, so also is the French Court philosophy, only of a more agreeable sort--nor will I merely say in a witty way: qui (quae) scit mori, cogi nequit--nor will I merely apply Seneca's expression about Cato to the Minister's Lady: majori animo repetitur mora quam initur; but I simply state the reason why she is universally called in Scheerau the Defaillante [or Fainting Lady]--and it is this: that a certain gentleman, on being asked how she had gained a certain weighty case despite the postponement of the term of closure, replied: en defaillante.
I return.... But I were a lucky man, if Time would sit down and let me come up with him; but as it is, I still follow him at a distance of several months, my freight of venture grows daily heavier; I must have paper enough for a double history--that which is already written and that which is all the time occurring. I worry myself to death and at last people have hard work to read me! But is there any help for it?----
Amandus, meanwhile, lay on the hardest bed in the world--the thorny and stony mattresses of the old monks feel like eider-down in the comparison--namely, on the sick bed: his desolate eve rested often on the door of his chamber, to see whether no Gustavus would open it, whether death might not enter in the form of a joy, a reconciliation, and with a love-pressure softly crush the flower of his life; but Gustavus, on his part, lay upon a magic bed to which a better God than Vulcan fastened him down with invisible fetters; he could hardly stir under his wiry coverlet.
On the morning when he was making ready to take the portrait and pay the visit to the Resident Lady, Oefel let off all around him a multitude of rockets of wit, and confessed to him, with the contentment with which a Belletrist always bears poverty in bodily goods and the sorer poverty in spiritual ones, in intellect and the like, so much as this,--that he had himself detected in Gustavus his penchant for the--Resident Lady, sooner perhaps than either of the two interested parties themselves. Every denial on the part of Gustavus was a new leaf in his laurel crown. "I will be more honest," he said; "I will be my own traitor, since I have no one outside of me. In the apartment where you have an altar, stands one for me; it is a Pantheon;[[70]] you kneel more before a God than a Goddess--but I find there my Venus (Beata). She wants nothing to make her a Venus de Medici than--position; but I know not which hand, in that position, I should kiss to her." ... Before Gustavus's pure soul, this lump of boue de Paris, happily flew by, into which at courts even good men step without reflection; even authors of this zone have something of this mud still sticking to them.
What pleased him about Beata (and in every maiden) was simply this, that he, as he thought, pleased her; of all the five hundred million women on the earth he would have loved every one if he had pleased them all; on the contrary not one of them, if not one of them liked him. He now related to Gustavus, through what window in the greenhouse of Beata's heart he had seen her love to him bloom out. Except a certain blockhead whom I knew in Leipsic, and a cat, who has nine lives, no man had more lives than this man; did he forfeit one--forthwith he had a fresh one; I mean he had more swoons than another had fancies. Such a mock suicide he could perpetrate at will, and whenever he needed it in his dramas, as an affecting theatre poet; oftenest, however, he and the Leipsic blockhead inflicted this death upon themselves in effigy, when among a lot of ladies they had singled out to visit that one who was most in love with them. For the whole body were distinguished from each other, the two blockheads said, not in the existence but simply in the degree of their love for both of the two fainting subjects. The highest degree of terror at the pantomimic apoplexy, said the swooning couple, is the notary's seal of the highest love. When, therefore, Oefel three weeks ago acted his masquerade death before Beata, under all the neckerchiefs present there beat no heart so tender and sympathetic as hers, which knew neither hardness of its own nor deception on the part of another. Indifferently Oefel put himself to the optical death; in love he rose again and with his pretended swoon had almost effected a real one. "Since then I have not been able so much as to speak to her on the subject," he said. Gustavus struggled with a great sigh, not at Oefel's unfeeling vanity, but over himself and Oefel's good fortune. "O Beata, in this bosom"--(his inner being addressed her)--"wouldst thou have found a more reserved and sincere heart, than is this which thou preferrest to it--it would have concealed its happiness, and now it does its sighs--it would have remained forever true to thee--ah, it will remain true to thee still!" Nevertheless he did not quite feel the disgusting element in Oefel's vanity, because a friend inoculates himself into our personality and grows into it to such an extent that we overlook his vanity as easily as our own and on like grounds.
As it may fare with Gustavus in my book as in real life, I ought to have made even before this the following observation: No one was easier to be misunderstood than he; all rays of his soul were broken by the cloudy veil of mild humility; nay, since Oefel had reproached him with wearing pride upon his countenance he had sought to appear just as humble as he was--his exterior was quiet, simple, full of love, without assumption, but also without any outburst of wit or humor. Fancy and understanding wrought in him, as in a solitary temple, altar-pieces in great masses, and consequently did not, like others, let snuff-box-pictures and medallions drop from the tongue--he was, as Descartes supposes the earth, an incrusted sun, but under the phosphorescing lights of the Court a dark earthly body--he was the extreme opposite of Ottomar, whose sun had burnt through his crust, and now stood before the people glistening, crackling, rending, calcining and hatching, Gustavus's soul was a temperate clime without storms, full of sunshine without solar heat, all overspread with green and blossoms, a magic Italy in Autumn; but Ottomar's was a polar land through which there passed in succession long scorching days, long frozen nights, hurricanes, ice-mountains, and luxuriant vales of Tempe.
To Gustavus's modesty, therefore, nothing appeared more natural than that Beata should place one who knew so well how to show off his mind and person, above him who could do neither, and who besides, had once vexed her father almost to death. Accordingly his blood crept slowly and sadly as he stole to the Resident Lady's. It seemed to him as if he could, to-day, look upon her as his friend--which he actually half did, when she, too, came to meet him with so mournful an air and face, like that in which a woman, a week after the loss of her beloved, with vacant eyes and cold cheeks, touches us most deeply. It was, she said, the anniversary day of her youngest brother's death, whom she most loved, and who loved her the most of all. She had herself painted in her mourning dross. Nothing has a greater effect than a gay person who for once falls into the semitones of sorrow. Gustavus had, indeed, too much predilection for persons in whose ears vibrated the knell of some bereavement; an unhappy person was to him a virtuous one. The Resident Lady told him she hoped he would paint away to-day's grief from her actual face and charm it into the pictured one--she had on that account assigned to-day for this distraction; to-morrow she would certainly be the better--she played carelessly, and merely with her right hand, a few dances, but only one or two measures, and with a vain struggle against her sadness. He must tell her some story before beginning, that he might not give to a face which she wore only one or two days in a year, an eternal life in his colors. But he had not yet acquired at Court either matter or manner for story-telling--at last she came upon the subject of his subterranean education. Only to her to-day's face was he capable, in the cloud-burst of heart-effusion, which since Amandus's grudge had been denied him, of such a narration. When he had ended, she said: "Now paint away; you should have told me something different."
She took her little Laura in her lap. To the Prince, who is an enthusiastic animal-painter, she must sit with a silk-haired poodle instead of the little girl. But what a group now falls upon his eye, his heart and his brush, to distract all three! At least they all tremble, while the mother arranges the little hands of Laura into a picturesque and child-like embrace--while she, silently and sadly, contending with the waves of the lips against the sorrow of the eye, looks pensively into his, and with the nearest hand playfully curls the hair of the little one--verily, he thought, ten times over! if an angel would fain put on a body, the human were not too poor for the purpose, and he might in this traveling-uniform make his appearance on any sun!