Now his spirit manned itself, and he wrote straight to the soul that belonged to him, and sent the letter to her brother for delivery. The latter came the next day, but seemed to him not to have any answer yet, because he would otherwise have given it with the first greeting. Charles introduced him to the Haarhaar court, where he had lately been; said every nerve there had on jack-boots, and every heart a hoop-petticoat; then went on to eulogize the youngest, but most unpopular Princess, Idoine; declared she possessed, in addition to all her other advantages,—for instance, purity, kindness, decision of character, which even on the throne selects for itself its own lot and life,—the further grace of amiableness, since even the princely bride, who loved no one else, hung upon her heart, and—last, not least—the advantage of a very deceptive similarity to Liana.
"Has Liana received my letter yet?" asked Albano. Charles handed it back to him. "By Heaven!" said he, ardently, and yet ambiguously, "I could not get it to her just now. But, brother, canst thou believe, only for one minute, that she does not remain forever most thine?" "I do not believe anything at all!" said Albano, offended, and tore his leaf on the spot into little bits no bigger than the letters. "Only we will," he continued, with a tone of emotion, "remain, as we are, firm as iron, and flexible as iron when it comes out of the furnace." The deeply touched friend sought to console him with the following: "Only wait, I pray, the illumination evening;[197] then she will speak with thee. She must certainly appear, and thou wilt wonder in what character, and for whom." He nodded silently; he easily gathered her part from her resemblance to Idoine, and from her expected office at court. But what help was it to his fortune?
With the return of his note, which he despatched against his pride, that same pride came back in renewed strength. Now was a hot seal stamped on Albano's bleeding lip; he had now nothing for and before him, except time, which was now his poison, and would by and by, as he hoped, be his antidote. Nothing was ever master over his sense of honor, when it was once roused. He could look forward to a scaffold on which blood spurted out, but he could not look upon a pillory where, under the heavy, poisonous, murderous pain of scorn and self-contempt, a downcast, distracted face hung on the sinful breast.
Charles sometimes approached with a few lights the long night-like riddle; but Albano, however much he wished them, staggered him by opposition, and sought not even to hear him, much less to ask him questions. So he lay on hard, youthful, thorny rose-buds, which a single hour can open into tender roses. Victories beget victories, as defeats do defeats; he found now, if not a complete relief from the emotions which besieged him, nevertheless a mountain-fortification against them, provisioned for a little eternity, in the shape of an astronomical observatory. With an entire and firmly collected soul he threw himself upon theoretical astronomy, in order not to see daylight, and upon practical astronomy in order not to see night. The watch-tower stood indeed upon a mountain intermediate between the city and Blumenbühl, and commanded a view of both; but he cast his eyes only upon the constellations, not upon those rosy-red spots of the earth, where they now could have sucked out of the cold flower-cups only water instead of honey. Thus amid the festive preparations in Lilar did he go armed to meet the long delaying evening when the presence of the fairest soul should either bless or destroy him, vainly looking from time to time at the distant telegraph of his destiny, which was constantly moving, uncertain whether with peaceful or hostile significance.
74. CYCLE.
To remove the seals from the enrolled acts of the foregoing history for the purpose of looking into it,—or to push back the blinds and shove up the windows of the same,—or to uncover so many covered ways and vehicles,—or, in fine, the whole matter,—all that is mere metaphors,—and the most inappropriate ones, too,—which cannot serve any other purpose than only to hold off still longer and more tediously the long-expected solution, which they would fain describe; much rather and better, methinks, will the whole war and peace position in the ministerial palace be at once freely laid bare as follows:—
Herr Von Froulay had, as has been already mentioned, come home from Haarhaar with a Belle-vue in his face, and with a mon-plaisir in his heart (provided these tropes do not seem more elaborate than exquisite). He told his lady openly, what had hitherto detained and enchanted him so long,—the future Princess, who had conceived for him a more than ordinary fancy. He threw a full, glorifying light on her enriched understanding,—he never praised anything beyond this in ladies,[198]—as well as a faint streak of shade upon his own her's; and pronounced himself fortunate in the possession of a person whose fine, persistent coquetry (he said) he for his part could recommend as a model, and whose attachment he, in fact, (that he pretended not to conceal,) reciprocated half-way, but only half-way, for it was perfectly true, what the Duke of Lauzun[199] asserted: in order to keep the love of Princesses, one must just hold them in right hard and short. In the old man accordingly there shoots up, as we see, quite late,—not unlike the case of fresh teeth,—which oftentimes old men do not cut till they are nonagenarians,—a lover's heart beneath the star; only it is more to be wished than hoped, he will especially play the ridiculous in the matter. For as he all the week long holds the helm of state, either on the rower's bench, to keep it in motion, or on the cabinet-maker's bench, to trim it down into a fine and light shape for the Prince; the consequence is, he is so tired when Saturday comes, that no Virgil and no tempest could persuade him—and though his feet had not more steps to take for the purpose than the number of feet in Virgil's hexameter, or of commandments in the Decalogue of Moses—to accompany a Dido out of the storm into the nearest cave. He does no such thing. He remains quite as free from sentimental and pathetic love as from sensual, especially as he apprehends that the former would in the end entangle him in the latter, because like a minor-tone it has quite a different returning scale from its ascending one. The ironical and stinging element in the man made every marriage—even that of souls—to him as well as to other world's people as disagreeable in the end as the spines of the hedgehogs make theirs. He lays up, therefore, in the future for the Princess only a cold, politic, coquettish, courtly love, such as she herself haply has, and such as he has occasion for, in order less to gain her than to gain from her, and to gain first of all the entire Prince. I promise myself cosmopolitan readers, who, I hope, find no offence to this personage in Froulay's partiality for his lady; for so soon as the court-preacher has but once laid his joining hand on the Princess, then has this house-steward made, as it were, the cut in the pea-hen,[200] and she can then be taken off untouched, and be feasted on in other places.
I have already (in the second volume) intimated the anxiety of the Minister's lady lest the Minister, if he should (in this volume) come back and not find Liana at home, should chafe; but, contrary to expectation, he approved; her use of the country air-bath fell in exactly with his design of sending her into the vapor-bath of the court atmosphere. He told her mother that it by no means displeased him that she should now be entirely well, since the new Princess would select her for her maid of honor, whenever he should say the word. He could not for three minutes see a sceptre or a sceptrelet lying by him without proving its polarity for himself, and either attracting or repelling something with it. As the famous theologian, Spener,—a predecessor of our Spener,—prayed to God so beautifully thrice a day for his friends, one finds with similar pleasure that the courtier daily prays a little for his friends before his god, the Prince, and seeks to obtain something.