The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

These bits of wood hold in their hands, as is well known, the law-giving power over the fairer portion of the female world; for they are the Legates and Vice-Queens, sent from Paris by the reigning line in the finery department, to rule over the female German Circles--and these wooden plenipotentiaries again send down their heads (of caps) as missi regii, to reign over the more common ladies of rank. If these reigning wooden heads [or blockheads] cannot come themselves, they then (as living Princes in the privy council supply their places by their portraits) send their laws and likenesses in Schmauss corpus of all imperial-decrees of fashion, which corpus we all have in our hands under the name of the Journal des Modes. In such circumstances--as one piece of wood plays into the hands of another--but more unselfishly than whole colleges; since, furthermore, new ones are elected annually as Proconsuls--I do not wonder that the system of government at the toilettes is well arranged and administered and that the whole female commonwealth which men cannot govern, is, by the electric female Regents sent in bass-viol cases, who stand and direct in this aristocracy from Lisbon to St. Petersburg, kept in excellent order and subjection.

I am not the man that needs to have it told him as a piece of news, that these dolls are the dressed wooden statues which are set up to (in the matter of dress) meritorious women;--nay, I am convinced that these public monuments, which are erected to attiring merit, have already quickened very many and it is to be hoped will yet stir up many more to a noble emulation, as a great man seldom does so much good as the respect paid to his statue; but a main point, without which all else limps, is manifestly this, that the statues must be--visible. Without that I would not give a button for the whole of them. What Socrates did for philosophy, I would do with the best dolls, namely, draw them down from the heaven of the great to the earth of the common people. I have a notion that, if one should take the images of the Virgin, or even the Saints and Apostles, which have hitherto, in Catholic churches, been dressed and undressed without the least profit or taste and should dress them up more rationally and advantageously, that is, just like the French dolls--if the church would regularly every month receive the Journal of Fashion, and according to its colored patterns re-dress the Marys (as ladies) and the Apostles (as gentlemen) and so set them around the altar, then would these people be imitated and venerated with more zest, and one would know, surely, for what one went to church, and what they wore in Paris and Versailles;--one would learn the fashions in good season, and even the common people would put on something more sensible, the Apostles would become the file-leaders of dress and Mary the true Queen of Heaven to the women. Thus must ecclesiastical benefits be utilized as state benefits; even so did the Dominican Monk Rocco in Naples (according to Münter) apply the extravagance of burning lamps in the streets at the altar of Mary to the multiplication of these altars and--the lighting of the streets.

End of the Word upon Dolls.

I still owe the reader the reason why the Minister's Lady insisted on taking the part of Jeanne--it was because that part allowed her a shorter skirt--or, in other words, because she could then display more easily her graceful Lilliputian feet. They were the only thing immortal about her beauty, as in Achilles the feet were the only thing mortal; in fact, they might, like the fallow-deer's, have served for tobacco-pipe stoppers.

How much better did Oefel appear by contrast. He is a downright fool, but in a proper measure. The Resident Lady surpassed the other in every bending of the arm, which a painter--and in every lifting of the foot, which a goddess--seemed to move; even in the laying on of the rouge, whereto the Bouse had to accustom her cheeks under a princess who used to require this fleeting flesh-tint of all her court-ladies--her rouge, like the reflection of a red parasol, only tinged her with a slight mezzotint.... In respect to beauty, hers was distinguished from the ministerial as virtue is from hypocrisy....

The drama was born into the world, through the five players, not in the opera house, but in a hall of the palace, which favored the Resident Lady's coronation. I was not there; but all was reported to me. The good Marie, Beata, had too much sensibility to show it; she felt that she was dramatizing the duplicate of her destiny, and she possessed too many of the good principles of the feminine character, to expose it before so many eyes. Her best part she therefore played inwardly. Henri (Gustavus), beside his inner one, played the outward one also very well, for the same reason. The letter which he was going to deliver confounded his part with his history which I am writing, and the false praise which the Minister's Lady had bestowed on his recent rehearsed part, from the very same unconvinced affectation in which she exaggerated her own, helped him reap true praise. The man who is the most bashful when much fancy glimmers under his actions, is the most courageous when it blazes forth.

It would be ridiculous, if my praise of the warmth of his playing should include the refinement of his performance; but the spectators gladly forgave him because poverty in refinement[^[87]] was coupled with wealth and heartiness, by way of drawing them into the illusion that he was from the country and merely Henri.

He needed this fervor, when, at the place where he reveals to her the brotherly relation, he would hand his beloved Beata the real love-letter--she unfolded it as her part required--with infinite grace he had spoken those words in which his whole life was infolded: "O believe me, indeed I am not thy brother"--she glanced at his name there--she had already half guessed the truth from the manner of his delivering the paper (for no maiden, be sure, ever yet was found wanting when she had to complete a man's stratagem)--but it was impossible for her to fall into a feigned fainting fit--for a true one seized her--the swoon overdid the part a little. Gustavus took it all for acting, so did the Minister's Lady, who envied her the gift of illusion. Henri brought her to merely by the means which his written part prescribed, and in a state of confusion, produced by the conflict of all emotions, love, consternation and nervous tension, and in a quite other than theatrical glorification, she played to the end Henri's beloved, in order not to play Gustavus's. After the performance she was obliged to renounce all the remaining festivities of the evening, and in a chamber which the Prince, as well as the Doctor, with much empressement, urged upon her, to seek rest for her still agitated nerves and in the letter unrest for her throbbing bosom. I lift the curtain still higher, dear soul, which then still veiled that which now robs thy nerves and thy bosom of peace!

Gustavus saw nothing; at the table, where he missed her, he had not the courage to inquire after her of the ladies sitting near him. Of other things he asked to-day more boldly; not merely had the applause he had gained been an iron-and-steel-cure to his courage, but the wine also, which he did not drink, but ate at the absurd Olla Podridas of the great folk. This eaten beverage fired him actually to publish the bon mots which he used once to say only to himself. And here I publicly testify, how it afflicts me to this very moment that I once on my entrance into the great world was a similar simpleton, and thought things which I should have spoken. Particularly do I repent this, that I did not say to the wife of a trench-major, who had by the hand her little girl and in her bosom a rose with a little one out of the midst of it: Vous voila! and point to the rose, though I had the whole bon mot lying all ready cast in my head. I afterward carried round the saillie for a long time in the chambers of my brain, watching my chance, but finally let it off in the stupidest way, and dare not here so much as name the person.

As there stood among the show-dishes, the optical parade-dishes of the great folks, a winter-landscape with an artificial frost, which melted in the warmth of the room and disclosed a leafy spring, Gustavus had a fine conceit about that, which no one has been able to remember and report to me. Nevertheless, although he ate under the finest ceiling-piece and in the neatest chair, he still, as a mere court-novice, took an interest in all he said and in every one he talked with; to thee, thou blessed one, no truth and no person were as yet indifferent. But there yet awaits thee that bitter transition from hate and love to indifference, which all have to undergo who concern themselves with many persons or many things to which they must needs remain cold!