The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

I learned all on the very day of her return, when I arrived at Maussenbach as an entire noble Rota (or juridical circle) not so much to punish as to examine a poor hostess, who--as in the Parisian opera they keep two or three sets of players in readiness for important parts--had taken the precaution to fill the prominent part of her spouse not with a double merely, but with twelve persons from the neighborhood, so that it might continue to be played as often as he himself was absent. And here was a case by which I could infer how little my manor lord was inclined to matrimonial infidelity, and how much more to virtue; he was really glad that the whole float of adulterous parishioners happened to come right by his shore and that he was made the instrument whereby justice could visit and thrash this secret society. Here he sought out with zest from the hostess, as in Jöcher's Literary Lexicon, the names of important authors and she was, to his virtuous ear, a Homer singing off the whole body of wounded heroes by name; he therefore out of sympathy, as she had absolutely nothing, remitted her entire fine; but the adulterous union and troop was brought to the tread-mill and the winepress, or pump-chambers and suction-works were applied to them.

So in Maussenbach at this pressing-out of this adulterous company the Lady of the Manor related to me what her daughter had related to her--in order to beg me, as former mentor of the lover, to draw the couple asunder, because her husband could not bear love. I could not tell her that I was engaged upon the biography of the couple and her own, and that love was the sticking-plaster and joiner's glue that held together the whole biography as well as the pair, and without which my whole book would fall to pieces, and that I should therefore offend the Jena reviewers if I should try to take his love away from him.--But so much I could well say to her: that it was impossible, for the love of such a couple was fire-proof and water-tight. I seemed to her, with my feeling, a little simple; for she thought of her own experience. I added cunningly: that the house of Falkenberg had for some years been rising and laying in fine capitals. To this she merely answered: "Fortunately her husband had never known it," (for a multitude of secrets she told everybody except her husband); "for he had already meditated for her Beata a different match." More than this I could not find out.

--But a fine broth is cooked here not merely for the hero, but also for his biographer; for the latter must certainly at last smart the worse for it on account of the portrayal of such intense scenes, and must often over such stormy sections cough away whole weeks. I will just confess to the reader candidly beforehand: such a steamy heat and tempest had already, last Friday, roared over the new palace and on Saturday swept through Auenthal and into my chamber, when Gustavus entered, all in a turmoil, and instituted the inquiry with me whither Mrs. Captain von Falkenberg, who with her mezzotinto cat occupies my first section and who is well known to be Gustavus's mother, whether she--was really such.... Meanwhile we must drive on briskly; for I know, too, that when I have built up my biographical Escurial and Louvre and sit at last on the roof with my dedicatory oration, I shall have put something into the book-shelves, the like of which the world does not often become possessed of, and which of course must charm reviewers as they pass by and make them say: "Day and night, summer and winter, even on work-days such a man must write; but who can tell whether it may not be a lady?"

Now, then, on all coming pages the barometer falls from one degree to another, ere the threatened tempest breaks forth. How Gustavus loved the absent Beata, everyone can guess, who has known by experience how love is never more tender, never more disinterested than during the absence of its object. Daily he went to the grave of his friend as to the holy sepulchre; to the birth-place of his happiness with a blissful trembling of every fibre; daily he did it half an hour later, because the moon, the only open eye at his soul's nuptials, rose half an hour later every day. The moon was and will forever be the sun of lovers, that soft decoration-painter of their scenes: she swells their emotions as she does the seas, and raises in their eyes also a flood-tide.--Herr von Oefel cast the look of an observer on Gustavus and said: "The Resident Lady has made of you what I made of Fraulein von Röper." Hereupon he reckoned up to my hero the whole pathognomy of love, the sighing, the silence, the distraction, which he had noticed in Beata and from which he deduced that her heart was no longer vacant--he himself was lodged there, he perceived. Oefel was a man whom a woman might treat as she would, in any case he concluded she was mortally in love with him.--Did she behave playfully, indulgently, familiarly with him, he would, say: "Nothing is more certain, but she ought to be a little more reserved;"--if she went to the opposite extreme, if she disdained to give him a look, a command, anything at most beyond her contempt and denied him even trifles; then he would swear, "Among one hundred men he could undertake to pick out the one she loved; it would be the only one she wouldn't look at."--If a woman struck into the middle way of indifference, then he observed: "Women understood so well the art of dissembling, that only Satan or love could find them out." It was impossible for him to provide room for all the women that wanted to get into the rotunda of his heart; hence he thrust the surplus (so to speak) into the pericardium, or heart's purse, wherein the heart also hangs, as into a partition--in other words, he transferred the scene of love from the heart to paper, and invented an epistolary and paper-love corresponding to the letter and paper-nobility. I have had many such chiromantic temperament-leaves of his in my hands, wherein he drives love, like butterflies, merely to poetic flowers;--whole volumes of such madrigals and Anacreontic poems to ladies, as have both the sweetness and the coldness of jellies. Such is Herr von Oefel and almost the whole belle-lettristic company.

Inasmuch as one praises himself only before people in whose presence one does not blush, such as common people, servants, wife and children: his vanity deserved a louder revenge than Gustavus visited upon him; he merely pictured to himself in silence how fortunate he was, in that, while others deceived themselves or made great efforts to gain the heart of his beloved, he could say confidently to himself, "she has given it to thee." But as to notifying his rival and messenger, or in fact any one, of this extra judicial gift, that not merely his position forbade but also his character; not even to me did he disclose it until he had quite other things to disclose to me and to disguise from me. I am well aware that this discretion is a fault, which modern romances, not unskillfully, labor to counteract; if in them a hero of romance or the writer has won a heart of a heroine of romance (and that she gives away as readily as if she had it on in front like a crop); then the hero or the writer (who are generally one and the same) forces the heroine to thrust her heart out and in as the cod does its stomach--nay, the hero himself draws forth the heart out of the breast that conceals it and shows up the captured globe to more than twenty persons, as the operator does an amputated excrescence--handles the ball as if it were a Lawrence's snuff-box--slips it off as if it were a cane-head, and hides another's heart as little as he does his own. I confess the traits of such goddesses cannot have been brought together from any worse models than were those after which the Greek artists created their goddesses, or the Romish painters their Madonnas, and it would imply very little knowledge of the world not to see that the princesses, duchesses, etc., in our romances would surely never have been hit off so well, if chambermaids, and still other damsels, had not sat to the author in their place; and thus, when the author had made himself the duke and his damsel the princess, the romance was done and his love immortalized, like that of the spiders which are likewise found paired and immortalized in amber. I say all this not to justify my Gustavus, but only to excuse him; for these romancers should surely also consider that the interesting rawness of manners, whose defects I seek vainly to cover up in him, would with them also show the same faults, if they, like him, had been spoiled by education, society, too nice a sense of honor and too fine reading (e. g., of the works of Richardson).

I am ashamed that Gustavus should have had such ignorance in love matters as to undertake to find out from some of the best romances whether he must now write a love-letter to Beata--nay, that her absence should have caused him anxiety about her disposition and embarrassment in regard to his own conduct. But the strength of the feelings makes the tongue poor and heavy, as well as the want of them. Fortunately little Laura often came skipping to meet him--not in the park (for nothing makes more ink-spots and coffee-stains on a fair skin than fair nature), but within four walls--and the pupil supplied the place of the teacher.

But a higher and newly risen form now entered upon the land of his love. Ottomar, of whose amphibious body--inhabitant of two worlds--there had hitherto been so much talk in ante-chambers, appeared there with it himself in the apartment of the Lady Resident. His first word to the latter was: "She must pardon him, for not having appeared sooner in her ante-chamber--he had been interred and consequently been unable to do so." But "he was the first," he said, "who so soon after death had come into Elysium" (here he looked round with a flattering smile at the landscape pieces of the tapestry), "and into the presence of the Divinities." This was mere satirical malice. Notoriously it is already an approved clause in the æsthetics of all elegants that they--and is my brother in Lyons in any other category?--have to take away entirely from the flatteries which they are obliged to say to women, the tone and look of sincerity, wherewith the ancient beaux used to provide their fleurettes [or flowery speeches]. In this mocking flattery he dressed up his disgust with women and courts. The women exasperated him because--as he fancied--they sought nothing in love but love itself,[^[79]] whereas the man knows how to blend with it still higher, religious, ambitious sentiments--because their emotions are only couriers, and every feminine heat is only a transient one, and because, if Christ himself should be teaching in their presence, in the midst of the most affecting passages they would turn aside to peep at his vest and his stockings. The courts enraged him by their unfeelingness, by their representation in his brother, and by their oppression of the people, the sight of which filled him with insuperable pain. Hence his accounts of travels in other countries were a satire upon his own; and as the French authors in the characters of the Sultans and Bonzes of the Orient for some time painted and punished those of the Occident, so in his narratives was the South the bearer and Pasquino of the North. The mild humane tolerance which he had proposed to himself in his last letter, he kept no longer than till he had punctuated and sealed it--or so long as he went to walk--or during the gentle unscrewing of the nerves after a wine-debauch. Nor did he care much to be respected by those whom he did not himself respect; in the midst of great, philosophic, republican ideas or ideals, the trivialities of the present were to him invisible and contemptible, now especially, when the future world or worlds obscured the thin one from which he looked at them, as through the blackened spy-glass one sees no object but the sun. Thus, e. g., he spent five grotesque minutes at the Lady Resident's in the process--since the proper body of the soul is made up solely of brain and spinal marrow and nerves--of ideally stripping off the skin of the most intellectual court-ladies and the handsomest court-gentlemen, furthermore of drawing out their bones and removing in thought the little flesh and viscera that clothed them, till nothing was left sitting on the ottoman but a spinal tail with a cerebral knob at the top. Thereupon he let these reversed knockers or erected tails run at each other and act and utter fleurettes, and laughed inwardly at the most clever people of birth, whom he had himself scalped and scaled. This is what we may call the philosophic Pasquill.

From the new palace he hastened out into the old, to Gustavus, who seemed to shun him. But in what way he had long since become acquainted with Gustavus, how he had been able to give him the first letter, why he, like Gustavus (even now) regularly adapted himself to an unknown place, why he was shunned by him, and what the three hours' conversation was which they had had with each other in the old palace, and which closed with the warmest love in the hearts of both--on all this still rests a long veil, which my conjectures cannot raise; for I certainly have several different ones, but they sound so extraordinary that I dare not lay them before the public until I can justify them better. Every vein, every thought, as well as heart und eye, expanded and magnified themselves for a new world, as he talked with the genial man. O what are the hours of the most congenial reading, even the hours of solitary exaltation, compared with an hour when a great soul works upon thee livingly, and by its presence redoubles thy soul and thy ideals and embodies thy thoughts?

Gustavus proposed to himself to repair from the palace to Ottomar, in order to forget who else was still wanting there. It was a still disclouded evening, a shadow, not of the already far-withdrawn summer, but of the after-summer, when Gustavus set forth, after vainly waiting for the return and society of the Doctor. In the empty air through which no feathered tones, no beating hearts fluttered any longer, no living thing showed itself save the eternal sun, whom no earthly autumn pales and prostrates and who forever looks with open eye upon our ball of earth, while below him thousands of eyes open and thousands close. On such an evening the bandage of old wounds which we bear about in us flies open. Gustavus arrived at the village in silence; at the entrance of the garden which half enclosed Ottomar's palace, stood a boy, grinding out the sublime melody of a sublime song[^[80]] on a hand-organ to the ear of a canary bird, which he was teaching to sing it. "I shall get a good deal, when he can whistle it," said the winsome organist. Leaning against a tree stood Ottomar, facing the far evening-redness and these evening tones; the sun of the outer world sank within him behind a great leaden cloud. Gustavus, before he reached him, had to pass by a dense niche and an old gardener who was in it, about whom there were two things that excited his wonder, first, that he said not a word of thanks for his Good Evening, and secondly, that so old and sensible a man had a child's garden in his cap on which his gaze was steadily fixed. Through the arbor he perceived on a grassy sun dial an elevation like a child's grave and a rainbow of flowers blooming round it and embowering it overhead; on the elevation lay the clothes of a child so arranged as if something lay in them and had them on. Ottomar received him with a tenderness which one finds in such an irresistible degree only in intense characters, and said with a low voice: "He celebrated the dying day of all the seasons, and to-day was that of the after-summer." On their way to the palace they passed by the gardener, who did not take off his hat--then by the empty clothes on the grave, which still lay under the flowers, and by the pianist who was still playing the song: "O youth adown the brook of time." As we find solemnity almost alone in books, seldom in life, in the latter it leaves so much the stronger an impression.

It must be further remarked that in Ottomar the expression of the strongest feelings, through a certain gentleness, wherewith his intercourse with the world and his age broke their force, moved on irresistibly into the silent abyss. He opened (children were the lackeys) a chamber of the third story. The chief thing there was not the pictures, with black grounds and white coffins, or the words over the coffins: "Herein is my father, herein my mother, herein my spring times," nor yet the very large painted coffin, above which was written: "Herein lie 6,000 years with all their human beings;" but the most important thing was the unpainted thing before which Gustavus bowed low, a fair woman bending down to a child, almost like our Gustavus, as if she was about to whisper something in his ear; further on he bowed before an old officer in uniform, who held a torn map, and before a handsome young Italian, who held an album. The child had a nosegay of forget-me-nots on his breast, the woman and the two men had a black bouquet. But what still more surprised him was Dr. Fenk at the window, with a rose on his breast.