The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

"Gustavus F."

At evening while he was in the act of sealing the letter, Beata passed in at the palace-gate. As he saw her bright form, which was so soon to be bathed in such a flood of tears, alight from the carriage, he started back, wrote the address, went to bed and drew the curtains, and softly----wept. Particularly eager was he to be out of the way of the romance-builder and stone-mason, Oefel, because his looks and tones were nothing but ignoble triumphs of his prophetic glance; and even Gustavus's dejection be still more ignobly counted among his own triumphs....

Actually, I would the Devil had all the four quarters of the world and would take them off and himself, too; for he has half got me. Few know that he will not let me bring this biography to an end. I am now convinced that I shall not die of apoplexy (as I lately fancied under my frozen head-piece) nor of consumption (which was a true maggot of the brain); but insure me against this, that I shall not be wrecked upon a polypus of the heart, to which all human probability points?--Happily I am not so obstinate as Musaeus in Weimar, who did not believe in the existence of his, which he fed and fostered as I do mine, with cold coffee, until the polypus choked his noble heart and cheated him of all his birthday festivals and all his wishes for those of his spouse. I say, I note more wisely the forerunners of polypus in the heart; I do not conceal from myself what lies hid behind a remittent pulse, namely, this very heart-polypus, the slow-match of death. The cursed literary secret tribunal, the reviewing-guild, creeps with its nooses round us good, easy simpletons, who keep on writing, and like butterflies die in the embrace of the Muses--but not a penny-piece, not a line, should we publish for such conscienceless birds of prey; what thanks do I get for setting up scenes which almost kill the scene-painter, and for writing biographical sketches which operate upon me not much better than poisoned letters? Who knows--for I seldom come to Scheerau now-a-days--who knows, except my sister, that in this biographical summer-house, which will be my mausoleum, I often paint over chambers and walls, which stop my pulse and breath to such an extent, that some day I must be found lying dead beside my work? Must I not, when I thus come within the electric range of death, jump up, circulate through my chamber, and in the midst of the tenderest or sublimest passages break off and black the boots on my feet or brush my hat and breeches, merely that it may not take my breath away, and yet go at it again, and in this cursed style alternate between emotion and boot-blacking?--A curse upon you critics in a body!

To this are added also a thousand pieces of drudgery which for some time have been pestering me all the oftener, because they somehow perceive that the polypus will soon give me the finishing stroke, and they will not much longer have any chance with me. My Maussenbach lobster, who is continually taking me between his legal shears and who thinks a poor justice has no right to die of anything else than labors, exofficio,--this Egyptian task-master I will pass over; my sister and Wutz, also, beneath me, both of whom are merry beyond all reason or measure, and sing me almost to death. But what oppresses me, is the oppressor of his subjects, the metallic press-work which they call our Prince.

I came near, lately, writing myself, in a paper of exceptions, into an honorable arrest. But here on the biographic paper I can even throw my oranges at the crowned head without danger of imprisonment. Fie! is it for this thou art Prince, that thou mayst be a waterspout, which sucks up everything over which it passes into its crater? And if thou wilt some time rob us, do it with no other hands than thine own, drive round begging through the country from house to house and raise thyself the regular taxes into thy carriage; but just as it has always been, our payments, after the transit-toll which they must give into the hands of all thy revenue-officers, arrive at last lean as far-traveled herrings at thy coffers, so that in fact thou dost get no more out of the heavy sums than convenient logarithms. Princes, like the East Indian crabs, have one gigantic pair of shears for seizing, and one dwarf-pair for carrying the prey to the mouth.

And so is it with the whole metropolis, where everyone regards himself as fellow-regent, and yet every one cries out at others meddling with the administration, and that children creep under the ermine as under the paternal dressing-gown and jointly act the father--where the palaces of the great are built of lapis infernalis [lunar caustic], and like leprous houses eat out smaller ones--where the Minister bears the Prince on his unfelt hand as the falconer does the falcon on his gloved one--where one regards the vices of the people as the revels of their superiors, and merely coat over with wax all moral carrion as the bees do their material, instead of carrying it out of the hive, i. e. where the police proposes to take the place of morals--where, as at every court, a moral figure is found to be as intolerable and stiff as a geometric one is in painting--where the devil is fully loose and the holy spirit is in the wilderness, and where people who, in Auenthal or elsewhere, hold crooked probes in their hand, whereby they would fain draw out foreign bodies and splinters from the wounds of the State, are told to their faces, they are not quite in their right minds....

I would it were true, then I should at least be perfectly sound. After such clump of personalities which, like so many monads, make up a body politic, mine is too puny to be taken out and looked at. Else I could now, after my anxieties about the State, enumerate those relating to myself.

And yet I will communicate to the reader my agonies or seven words on the cross, although to the very cross under which he will pity me, he himself has helped nail me. In fact no devil concerns himself much about my sickness. I sit here and represent to myself, out of unrequited love to the reader, all day long, that fire may be cried, which, like an author's stove, shall lay all my biographic paper in ashes and perhaps the author too. I further torment myself with imagining that this book may in the mail-coach or in the printing-office be so spoiled, that the public shall be as good as cheated out of the whole work, and that even after the printing it may find its way into a baiting-house and torture-chamber, where a critical provider and general of the reviewing order has his reviewer sitting with their long teeth, to tear off from my tender Beata and her lover clothes and flesh, and whose room is like that room full of spiders which a certain Parisian kept, and which at his entrance always darted down from the ceiling to suck the bleeding doves' feathers which he had pulled out, and from whose operations he with great pains managed to obtain yearly a silk stocking.... All these torments I put upon myself, merely on the reader's account, who would be the greatest loser if he did not have me to read; but it is all one to this hard man, what they have to undergo who minister to his gratification. When at last I have freed my hands from these nails of the cross, still life itself wearies me as such a miserable tedious monochord of a thing that it must distress every one who reckons up how often he has to draw breath and heave his breast up and down until it stiffens, or how often before his death he will be obliged to lift himself up on his boot-jack or stand before his shaving-glass. I often contemplate the greatest misery in a whole life, namely, that which results if one had to dispatch all the shavings, frizzlings, dressings, sedes in succession, which are now scattered through a life-time. The gloomiest night-thought which broods over my still somewhat blooming prospect, is this, that death may in this nocturnal life, where existence and friends move like widely sundered lights in the dark mine, snatch my precious loved ones out of my powerless hands and lock them up forever in close coffins, to which no mortal, but only the greatest and most invisible hand, has the key.... For hast thou not torn so much from me already? Would I speak of sorrow or of the vanity of life, if the gay youthful circle were not yet broken in pieces, if the colored band of friendship, which still fastens the earth and its enamel to man, had not yet been sawed asunder to within one or two threads? O thou whom I even now hear weeping from a far distance, thou art not unhappy on whose breast a beloved heart has grown cold, but thou art so who thinkest of the corrupting element, when thou wouldst rejoice in the love of the living friend, and who in the most blissful embrace askest thyself: "How long shall we continue to feel each other?"

THIRTY-NINTH, OR 1st EPIPHANY, SECTION.

Now at last the case has become desperate; my disease has taken at once the biographical and the legal pen out of my hand, and despite all Easter Fair's and Fatalia, it is impossible for me to put pen to paper on any subject....