Something of the kind might be brought about, I flatter myself, if it were commanded to write letters only on stamp-paper. An inspecting and stamping office appointed for that purpose would then read everything over beforehand.
Or one might prohibit in future all private seals, just as they do mint-stamps for private coin. A seal-department would then interfere, with full rights, and seal up, as they now do the legacies of the deceased, so in that case those of the living.
Or—which is perhaps preferable—an epistolary censorship must commence. Unprinted newspapers, nouvelles à la main,[205]—that is, letters,—can never, inasmuch as they divulge still greater mysteries, demand a greater freedom of censorship than printed newspapers; especially as every letter, now-a-days, so easily becomes a circular, going everywhere. A catalogue of prohibited letters (index expurgandarum) would always be, in that case, a word to correspondents.
Or let the postmasters be put under oath that they will be faithful referendaries of whatever they find weighty or considerable in the letters, which, before despatching, they have laid in the mental letter-balance, and closed again, with the hope, according to the Leibnitzian principle of the non-distinguishable seal, of speeding them far and wide.
If the State finds all these ways of reading and closing letters new and difficult, then it may go on in its own way—of opening them.
Froulay flew, laughing, to his lady, and assured her her falsehood towards him was no news to him at all. Her present plan, merely to work against Herr von Bouverot and himself, he understood full well. Hence it was that Rabette had had to come in, and the daughter to go out. Meanwhile he would show the hypocrite and bigot, or whoever it might be, that she had not merely a mother, but a father too. "She must immediately come home; je la ferai damer,[206] mais sans vous et sans M. le Compte," he concluded, with an allusion to the office of court-dame.
But the Minister's lady began, in accordance with her vehement contempt of his projects and powers, with that coldness which would have more exasperated every ardent one than this cold one, to say to him that she must needs disapprove and oppose Liana's and the Count's love still more than he did; that she had merely, in an excessive and otherwise never disappointed confidence in Liana's openness of soul, believed her rather than herself, and, notwithstanding so many signs of Albano's partiality, let her go to Blumenbühl; that she would, however, give him her word on the spot to act with as much energy and spirit against the Count as against the German gentleman, and that she was, as surely as she knew Liana, almost certain of the easiest and happiest result.
Of course this was unexpected to him and—incredible, especially after the previous concealment; only the finest man's soul distinguishes in the female the blending boundaries of self-deception and wilful delusion, weakness and deceit, accident and intent; besides, the Minister's lady was one of those women whom one must first love in order to know them, a case which is generally reversed. He readily accepted on the one hand the confession of her agreement and co-operation,—merely for the sake, hereafter, of turning it as a weapon against her;—but he could not conceal, on the other hand, that there again (that was always his phrase) she had, according to her own confession, neglected to watch over her children from a want of jealousy. He retained the habit, when an open-hearted soul showed him its breaches, of marching in upon it through those breaches, as if he himself had made them. The penitent who knelt before him for forgiveness he would crush still lower, and instead of the key of absolution draw forth the hammer of the law.
I owe it here to the Spaniards, who will one day become acquainted with me through miserable translations,[207] and to the Austrian knighthood of the Golden Fleece, who perhaps read the original in a counterfeit edition, to assign the reasons why the house of Froulay did not bespeak feasts of joy—instead of court-mourning—on the occasion of these advances by a son of their order, a Spanish Grandee, who often lays upon himself a German princely sceptre as a yardstick to measure himself withal. For every Spaniard must have hitherto wondered about this.