The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

"You are," said he with a fine look, which was meant to put another meaning upon Beata's words, "a little of an egotist--that is not your talent.--Yours must be not to be alone. You have hitherto concealed your face as well as your heart; think you that at my court no one is worthy to admire and to see both?" For Beata, who fancied she had no need to be modest, but only humble, such a praise was too great for her not to think of refusing it. His look seemed to require an answer, but she gave one, on the whole, as seldom as possible, because every step carries the old noose along with it into a new one. He had at first sought her hand with the air with which one takes that of a patient; she had carelessly let him have it, but she had let it lie bedded in his like a dead glove--all his feelers could not detect in it the least sensitiveness; she withdrew it at the next opportunity, neither slowly nor hurriedly, out of the rusty sheath.

The dance, the events of the day, the night, the stillness gave his words to-day more fire than usual. "The lots," said he, playing, as one piqued, with a coin in his waist-coat pocket, by way of supplying the place of the escaped hand, "have fallen unluckily. Persons who have the talent of inspiring sensations, have unhappily often the disagreeable one of reciprocating none, themselves." Suddenly he fixed his glance upon her breast-pin, on which gleamed a pearl with the word, "Amitiè;" from that he turned his eyes to his Bolognese coin, on which, as on all coins of Bologna, was inscribed the word "Libertas." "You deal with friendship as Bologna with Freedom--both of you wear that as a legend which you have not in fact." The nobler class of persons cannot hear the words Friendship, Feeling, Virtue, even from the most ignoble, without being reminded by the words of the greatness of which their hearts are capable. Beata covered with her heaving breast a sigh which would fain say, only too plainly, what joys and sorrows, feeling and friendship gave her, but it touched not the Prince.

His searching glance, which was owing not to his sex, but to his station, overtook the sigh which he had not heard. He made at once, contrary to the nature of an appeal and of nature itself, a leap in the dialogue: "Do you not understand me?" he said, in a tone full of expectant homage. She said with more coldness than the sigh promised, that she could not to-day do anything with her sick head than rest it on--her arm, and that alone made it difficult for her to express with equal strength the reverence of a subject, and the difference between her opinions and his. Like beasts of prey, where creeping effected nothing, he resorted to leaps. "Oh, believe me," said he, adopting as his own Henri's declaration of love; "Marie, indeed I am not thy brother!" A woman gains nothing by long refusing to understand certain declarations, except--the most unmistakable ones. Besides, he still lay before her in Henri's attitude. "Permit me," she answered, "the alternative of regarding it either as earnest or as jest--off the stage I am less capable of deserving the rose-prize or of neglecting it; but it is you who in all cases have merely to give it."--"But to whom?" said he (and this shows that against such persons no reasons are of any avail)--"I forget in the presence of the beautiful all ugly ones, and all beauties in the presence of the most beautiful--I give you the prize of virtue, give me that of sensibility--or may I take it myself?" and his lips hastily darted toward her cheeks, on which hitherto were more tears than kisses; but with a cold astonishment, which he had found warmer in all other women, she drew herself away from him neither an inch too much nor too little, and in a tone in which were contained at once the respect of a subject, the repose of a virtuous and the coldness of an inexorable soul; in short, a tone as if her request had no connection with what had gone before--She presented to him her submissive petition that he would most graciously be pleased (inasmuch as the Doctor had assured her she could not do anything worse than keep awake) to retire--or as I should have expressed it--go to the devil. Before going so far he indulged in a little more badinage, in which he almost got back to his old tone, filed his inhesive pro-counter-protests and withdrew.

Nothing but the peace which she derived from the hands of virtue and love and Gustavus's letter ensured her the happy result that this Jacob, or Jack, sprained his hip in wrestling with this angel--which, of course, vexed the mortified Jacques so much the more in proportion as the angel grew more beautiful during the wrestling, as every excitement in a woman is notoriously a momentary cosmetic.

In your whole life, Gustavus and Beata, never have you opened your eyes upon a morning with such different feelings as on this, when Beata had nothing to reproach herself with and Gustavus everything. Over the whole sunken spring-time of his life there settled down a long winter; out of himself he had no pleasure, within himself no consolation, and before him, instead of hope, remorse.

He tore himself away, with as much forbearance as his despair allowed him, from the objects of his anguish and hurried with his boiling blood towards Auenthal, to Wutz--into my lodgings. I saw no remaining sign of life about him, save the rain-storm from his eyes. He made a vain attempt to begin:--what with blood, ideas and tears, his words were drowned--at last, in a flame of emotion, he turned away from me toward the window, and with his eye fixed on one spot related to me how low he had fallen from himself. Thereupon, in order to avenge himself upon himself by his mortification, he made himself visible, but only held out till he came to the name of Beata; here, when for the first time he brought before me the vanished flower-garden of his first love, he was compelled to cover his face, and said: "Oh, I was altogether too happy and am quite too miserable."

The delusion of the Resident Lady in taking him for the brother of Beata I could easily explain to him by the resemblance between the likenesses of himself and of the first son. First of all I endeavored to restore to him the weightiest credit--that which he must find in himself: whoever ascribes to himself no moral strength, at last forfeits it in reality. His fall was owing merely to his new situation; nothing is so dangerous about a temptation as its novelty; men and clocks go most correctly in a uniform temperature. For the rest, I beg the romancers, who find it far easier than feeling and experience attest, for two quite pure, enthusiastic souls to change their love into a fall, not to take my hero as proof of their position; for here the second pure soul was wanting; on the contrary, the union of all the colors of two fair souls (Gustavus's and Beata's) will never produce any other than the white of innocence.

His determination was this, to tear himself away from Beata forever by a letter--to leave the palace with all objects that reminded him of his fair days or his unhappy ones--to live through or sigh through the winter with his parents, who always spent it in the city, and then in summer to shuffle the cards anew with Oefel for the game of life, in order to see what there might still be, when repose of soul is lost, to gain or to forfeit.... Unhappy darling! why does thy present history, just at the very moment when I might bring my written one into coincidence with it, put on a mourning veil? Why must thy short, sad days fall precisely upon the short, sad days of the almanac? O in this winter of sorrow no Jacob's ladder of enthusiasm will lift me to the heights whence I may survey and sketch the blooming landscape of thy life, and I shall write about thee little, in order to take thee the of oftener in my arms!

And you, ye frightful souls, who count a misstep of which Gustavus feels as if he must die, as among your distinctions and delights, you who, not like him, lose you own innocence, but murder that of others, dare I defile him by your neighborhood on my paper? What will you yet make out of our century? You crowned, starred, knighted, mitred eunuchs! Of you I speak not, and have never complained that you burn out and precipitate, with as much furnace fire as you can get together, out of your own ranks the so-called virtue (i. e., the semblance of it), which is so brittle an alloy in your female metals--for in your rank temptation has no longer a name, no significance, no evil consequences, and you do little or no harm there--but swoop not down upon our middle class, upon our lambs, with your vulture claws! With us you are yet an epidemic (I fall, like you, into a confusion, but only of metaphors), which sweeps away the more victims by reason of its newness. Rob and kill there anything else rather than female virtue! Only in a century like ours, in which all fine feelings are strengthened except the sense of honor, can one trample under foot that of woman, which consists merely in chastity, and, like the savage hack down a tree forever in order to get its first and last fruits. The robbery of a woman's honor is as much as that of a man's, i. e., thou destroyest the escutcheon of a higher nobility, breakest the sword, takest off the spurs, tearest to shreds the diploma of nobility and the ancestral register; that which the executioner does to a man thou executest upon a poor creature who loves this hangman, and only cannot control her disproportionate imagination. Abominable! And of such victims, whom men's hands had fastened with an everlasting iron collar to disgrace, there are in the streets of Vienna two thousand, in those of Paris thirty thousand, in those of London fifty thousand--Horrible! Death-angel of vengeance! count not the tears which our sex wrings from woman's eyes and causes to fall burning on the frail female heart! Measure not the sighs and the agonies under which the filles de joie expire, and which awaken no regrets in the iron fils de joie, except because he must betake himself to another bed which is not a death-bed!

Tender, true, but weak sex! Why are all the faculties of thy soul so great and brilliant, that thy considerateness is so small and pale in the comparison? Why does there stir in thy heart an inborn respect for a sex which spares not thine own? The more ye adorn your souls, the more graces you make of your limbs, the more love you have heaving in your bosoms and beaming from your eyes, the more you transform yourselves by enchantment into angels; so much the more do we seek to hurl these angels down out of their heaven, and in the very century of your highest transfiguration, authors, artists and nobles all conspire to form a forest of upas-trees under which you are doomed to die, and we exalt each other in proportion to the number of well-poisonings and beaker-poisonings we have prepared for your lips!