The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

He said that very day: "When once the heart of a woman is so wide open, one has nothing to do, but just let her do." That was a charming thing for him; for it saved him--what might cause him some scruples--the trouble of inveigling her. As often as he read Lovelace's or the Chevalier's[^[84]] letters, he wished his simple conscience would allow him to lead away a perfectly innocent and resisting maiden after a fine plan. But his conscience would hear no reason, and he was obliged to confine his piratical or privateering pleasures to the beguiling of such innocent persons as he caused to act in his head or in his romance; to such a degree, in weak people, does feeling prevail over the decisions of reason, even in philosophical women. Consequently Oefel's knowledge of women left him only the power of laying snares, not for innocence, but for guilt, and the only thing in which he could labor with renown was to be the seducer of seductresses.

Allow me to make a shrewd observation. The distinction between Lovelace and the Chevalier is the moral difference between their nations and decades. The Chevalier is a devil with such a philosophic coldness that he is to be ranked among those devils of Klopstock's, who cannot be converted. Lovelace, on the contrary, is a quite different man, a mere vain Alcibiades, whom a position in the State or a nuptial one might half amend. Even then, when his inexorableness to imploring, wrestling, weeping, kneeling innocence seems to give him a nearer likeness to models from hell, he softened his hypocritical blackness by a stroke of art which does some credit to his own conscience and the greatest honor to the genius of the poet, namely, that by way of beautifying his inexorableness, he regards the actual object of compassion, the kneeling, etc., Clarissa, as a theatrical, picturesque work of art, and in order not to be affected will not observe the bitterness of her tears, but only her beauty; not the distress, but only the picturesqueness of her attitude. In this way one can take pleasure in hardening himself against anything; hence beaux esprits, painters and their connoisseurs often have no tears or too many for actual misery, for the mere reason that they regard it as artistic.

But I must hasten on more speedily to the festal day of the Resident Lady, whose web touches and entangles our Gustavus with so many kinds of threads.

He committed to memory with great delight his part in the Drama, of which much will yet have to be said, and wished nothing, except that he did not yet know it by heart. Beata had the same feeling about hers: the reason was, that their parts on the stage were directed to each other, consequently their thoughts, now, were so, too; and for the shy Beata it was especially delicious, that she could with good conscience memorize tender thoughts of love for him, which she hardly dared to have, not to say express. In order not to be always thinking of him, she often diverted her mind by the labor of learning by heart the aforesaid part. Good soul! try always to deceive thyself; it is better to will it, than not to care about it at all! Her adoptive brother had hitherto been utterly unable to devise any way of meeting her; the Resident Lady had forgotten him and thereby the means of bringing it about, in her attention to the Russian section and torso; he himself had not persistency enough, still less the dignity which would make it piquant and charming--till Herr von Oefel said to him with a significant expression of countenance, that the Lady Resident wished to have him see some pictures which Knäse had left there. "Yes, I have been wanting this long time to begin copying in the cabinet," said he, and deceived hardly anyone except himself. Noticing his blush of confusion, Oefel said to himself: "I know all, my dear man!"

At last a fine forenoon brought the two souls, that could more easily find each other than their bodies could, together at the Lady Resident's. The light of day, their previous separation, the new situation, and love, made all the charms of both new, all their features fairer, and their heaven greater than their expectations--but do not look at each other too much, nor yet too little, for they are glancing at your glances! Well, do it as much as you like; thou canst not hide it from a Bouse, Gustavus, that thine eye which is not contracted by penetration, but opened wide with love, always detains itself among objects in the neighborhood of one at whom it would fain steal side glances;--nor does it help thee, Beata, that thou avoidest more than usual standing near him or giving him occasion for his voice and cheeks to be his traitors! It availed thee, naught, as thou thyself sawest, to seek to escape the repetition of the idolo del mio at his arrival; for did not the Lady Resident beg him to glide after thy voice with his fingers on the harpsichord, and to publish his inner storm of joy by the gleam of the eye and the pressure of the keys and the sins against time? Those of my readers who have frizzled or served or spoken with the Resident Lady, or actually loved her, can testify for me against other readers, that among other mantel-ornaments of her toilette-chamber--inasmuch as the grandees like nothing but finery to eat, occupy, wear, sit on and sleep on--there were also Swiss scenes, and among these a tragacanth copy of the hermitage-mountain; this Olympus of joy, before the eyes of Gustavus, Beata's could no longer climb, often as they had formerly shone upon this very mountain--at last the eyes of both grew moist, when the name of Amandus rang through both of them, with a sweeter and livelier emotion than one feels for a departed soul. In short, like all lovers, they would have betrayed themselves less, if they had concealed themselves less. The Lady Resident seemed to-day, what she always seemed; she had in her power a still, thoughtful, not impassioned dissimulation, and one saw not on her face the false looks chase away the true ones. The finest picture in the collection left by the Russian was not at home, but under the copying-paper of the Prince.

So dumb and yet so near was Gustavus compelled to remain vis-â-vis with his beloved; with only three words, with only a passing pressure of the hand; oh, if he only knew how to discharge his soul electrified with emotions!--Why do we long to transfer all our feelings from our own hearts into another's?--And why has the dictionary of sorrow so many quires, and that of rapture and of love so few leaves?--Only a tear, a pressure of the hand and a singing voice the genius of the universe gave to love and to rapture and said: "Speak with these!"--But had Gustavus's love a tongue, when (during a seven seconds' turning aside of the Resident Lady) in the looking-glass, to which he sat opposite at the harpsichord, with his thirsting eyes he kissed the hovering image of his dear songstress--and when the image looked upon him--and when the shy image under the fire-stream of his eyes shut its eyelids--and when he suddenly wheeled round toward the near original of the colored shadow that was looking away again, and as he sat there penetrated with his love into the drooping eye of his friend standing by him, and when in a moment which languages cannot paint, he dared not pour himself out in one, not so much as in one sound?--For there are moments when the treasure upraised, out of the depths of another's soul sinks back again, and disappears in the innermost recesses, if one speaks--nay, in which the tender, tremulous, swimming, burning picture of the whole soul can hardly protect itself in or beneath the transparent eye, as the fading pastel-form does under the glass....

For this reason he did just right in my view, to sit down at home and compose his love-letter forthwith. By such an insurance-policy of the heart the biographer has always in a proper sense deeded his love. But when Gustavus had finished it, he knew not how he should insinuate it, by what penny-post. He carried it round with him so long that at last he grew dissatisfied with it--then he wrote a new and better one and again carried that round until he had written the best one, which I will insert in the next section. I take this opportunity to announce to the public for next Easter my "expeditious and always ready love-letter-writer," which all parents should procure for their children. Apropos! The fur courier's-boot and the mustard-plaster and the icy-crown have happily sent the blood into my feet, and left no more in my head than it needs, in order to draw up agreeable abstracts or extracts for a German people.

THIRTY-SEVENTH, OR CHRISTMAS-EVE, SECTION.

Love-Letter.--Comedie.--Bal Paké.--Two Dangerous Midnight Scenes.--Practical Application.

I have at this joyous season no very joyous feelings; perhaps because my body, which threatens to fall to pieces, no more goes right than a longitude-watch or sea-chronometer--perhaps also the contents of this section lie on my brain--perhaps, too, at the sight of the universal joy of the children, the blood creeps so mournfully between the evergreen and autumnal flower age of the remembrance how it once was, how the joys of man roll away, how they mark their remoteness from us by a reflection gleaming over from distant shores, and how our longest days seldom give us so much as the shortest or Christmas night gives the child in the way of enjoyment or of hope.