FORTY-FIFTH, OR SEXAGESIMA, SECTION.
An ominous pleurisy--if one may put any faith in the entire system of semeiology and the hard beatings of the pulse and strictures in the chest--has grasped and held me since day before yesterday and threatens to make an end of my maltreated life and of this biography--unless by a fortunate cure death should be softened into an empyema[[88]]--or into a phthisis--or vomica [abscess] or into a scirrhus [glandular induration], or else into an ulcer.----After such a heating, one has only to bore into my breast, so as to draw out, from that source whence there once came a book full of the milk of human kindness, life and the morbid matter together....
FORTY-SIXTH, OR ESTO-MIHI, SECTION.
You good readers! who have followed me with your indulgent eyes from the chess-board of the first section to the death-bed of the last, my road and our acquaintance are at an end--may life never be a burden to you--may your practical eye never forget in the little field the great one; in this first life the next; in men, yourselves--may dreams crown your life and may none affright your dying hour ... My sister shall conclude all.... Live happily and sink happily to sleep!...
FORTY-SEVENTH, OR INVOCAVIT, SECTION.
My good and martyred brother will have it that I should finish this book. Ah, his sister would not be able to do it for grief, if it should become necessary. But I hope to heaven that my brother is not so sick as he fancies. After dinner indeed he has such a notion. And I, if we are both to have any peace, must needs confirm him in it, and acknowledge him to be just as sick as he imagines himself. Yesterday the schoolmaster had to rap on his chest, that he might hear whether it rang, because a certain Avenbrügger in Vienna had written that this ringing showed sound lungs. Unfortunately it rang but little, and he therefore gives himself up; but I will, without his knowledge, write to Dr. Fenk, that he may allay his qualms. I have further to state that young Mr. von Falkenberg is sick at the house of his parents in Ober-Scheerau, and that my friend Beata is also sick with hers.... It is a gloomy winter for us all. May the spring heal every heart and restore to me and the readers of this book my dear brother!
FORTY-EIGHTH, OR MAY, SECTION.
The Pounding Cousin.--Cure.--Bathing.--Caravan.
Once more you are to have him--the Brother and Biographer! In freedom and gladness I come forth again; the winter and my craziness are over and clear joy dwells in every second, on every octavo page, in every drop of ink.
It happened thus: Every imagined sickness presupposes an actual: nevertheless there are imaginary causes of sickness. My alternation between health and sickness, between merry and mournful, soft and stern moods, had reached, in its rapidity and its contrasts, the maximum point; I could no longer, for want of breath, dictate a protocol, and as to the scenes of this biography I could not so much as conceive them; when on a ruddy, glowing winter evening, I sallied out and strode round through the rosy-tinted snow, and in this snow lighted on the word heureusement.