They alighted down in Ratto's Italian Cellar. The house seemed to the Count at first, after the contemplation of broad nature, like a fragment of rock rolled upon it,—although every story, indeed, groans under architectural burdens,—but the heavy feeling of subterranean confinement[130] soon forgot itself, and singular was the sound that came down into the Italian vault of the rattling of carriages overhead. The Captain bespoke a punch royal. If he goes on so in his good fire-regulation, and always has a full cask at home as extinguishing-apparatus, and his hose-pipes well proved, then my book cannot be touched by the objection, that, as in Grandison, too much tea is consumed; more likely is it that too much strong drink will be absorbed.
Schoppe was sitting in the Italian souterrain. He loved not the Captain, because his inexorable eye spied out in him two faults which to him were heartily intolerable, "the chronic ulcer of vanity and an unholy guzzling and gormandizing upon feelings." Charles paid him back his dislike; the hottest waves of his enthusiasm immediately bristled up in ice-peaks before the Titular Librarian's face. Only not to-day! He drank so amply of king's-punch,—whereof a couple of glasses might have burnt through all the heads of Briareus or of the Lernean serpent,—that he then said everything, even pious things. "By heavens!" said he, healing himself in this Bethesda-pool by—drawing from it, "since it is all fiddle-faddle about this growing better, one should obfuscate himself[131] with a shot, in order that the baited spirit may once for all go free from its wounds and sins." "From sins?" said Schoppe; "lice and tape-worms of the better sort will by all means emigrate from my territory, when I grow cold; but the worst of them my inner man will certainly carry up with it. By the hangman! who tells you, then, that this whole churchyard of poor sinners here below shall at once march home as an invisible church full of martyrs and Socrateses, and every Bedlam come out a high-light lodge? I was thinking to-day of the next world, when I saw a woman in the market with five little pigs, every one of which she would fain drive before her with a string tied to its leg, but which shot off from her and from each other like wisps of electric light; now, said I, we, with our few faculties and wishes, which this cultivating age sets out in quintuplo, fare already as pitifully as the woman with her drove; but when we get ten or more new farrows by the rope, as the second world, like an America, must surely bring new objects and wishes, how will the Ephorus[132] manage his office there? I prepare myself to expect there greater indescribable distresses, feudal crimes and oppositions." But Roquairol was in his red blaze; he exalted himself far above Schoppe and above himself, and denied immortality plumply, by way of parodying Schoppe. "An individual man," said he, "could hardly, on his own account alone, believe in immortality; but when he sees the masses, he has pity, and holds it worth the while, and believes the second world is a monte testaceo of human potsherds. Man cannot come nearer to God and the Devil hereafter than he does already here; like a tavern-sign, his reverse is painted just like his obverse. But we need the fictitious future for a present; when we hover ever so still above our slime, we yet are continually flapping, like carps lying still, with poetic fins and wings. Hence we must needs dress up the future paradise so gloriously that only gods shall fit into it, but, just as in princes' gardens, no dogs. Mere trumpery! We cut out for ourselves glorified bodies, which resemble soldiers'-coats; pockets and buttonholes are wanting; what pleasure can they hold, then?" Albano looked upon him with amazement. "Knowest thou, Albano, what I mean? Just the opposite." So easy is everything for fancy, even freaks of humor.
At this moment he was called out. He came back with a red billet-doux. He put on his cravat,—he had been sitting there à la Hamlet,—and said to Albano he would fly back in an hour. At the threshold he paused, still thinking whether he should go, then ran swiftly up the steps.
In Albano the cup of joy, into which the whole day had been pouring, overflowed with the sparkling foam of a waggish humor. By heaven! drollery became him as charmingly as an emotion, and he often walked round for a long time without speaking, with a roguish smile, as slumbering children smile, when, as the saying is, angels are playing with them.
Roquairol came back with strangely excited eyes; he had stormed wildly into his heart; he had been wicked, for the sake of despairing, and then, on his knees, at the bottom of the precipice, confessing to his friend the nature of his life. This man, so wilful, lay involuntarily bound to the windmill wings of his fancy, and was now fettered by a calm, now whirled round by the storm, which he imagined himself cutting through. He was now, after the analogy of the fire-eaters, a fire-drinker, in the uneasy expectation of Schoppe's departure. The latter departed at last, despite Albano's entreaty, with the answer: "Redeem the time, says the Apostle; but that means, Prolong your life all you can: that is time. To this end the best shops of the times, the apothecaries', require that a man, after punch royal, shall go to bed and sweat immoderately."
Now how changed was all! When Zesara joyfully fell on his neck,—when the delirium of youth grew to the melodies of love, as the rain in Derbyshire-hollow at a distance becomes harmonies,—when from the Count's lips flowed sweetly, as one bleeds in his sleep, his whole inner being, his whole past life, and all his plans of the future, even the proudest (only not the tenderest one),—and when, like Adam in the state of innocence (according to Madame Bourignon), he placed himself in such crystal transparency before his friend's eye, not from weakness, but from old instinct, and in the faith that such his friend must be,—then did tears of the most loving admiration come into the eyes of the unhappy Roquairol at the unvarnished purity, and at the energetic, credulous, unsophisticated nature, and at the almost smile-provoking naïve and lofty earnestness of the red-cheeked youth. He sobbed upon that joy-drunken bosom, and Albano grew tender, because he thought he was too little so, and his friend so very much in that mood.
"Come out o' doors,—out o' doors!" said Charles; and that had long been Albano's wish. It struck one, as they saw, on the narrow cellar-stairs, the stars of the spring heaven overhead glistening down through the entrance of the shaft. How freshly flowed the inhaled night over the hot lips! How firmly stood the world-rotunda, built with its fixed rows of stars high and far away over the flying tent-streets of the city! How was the fiery eye of Albano refreshed and expanded by the giant masses of the glimmering spring, and the sight of day slumbering under the transparent mantle of night! Zephyrs, the butterflies of day, fluttered already about their dear flowers, and sucked from the blossoms, and brought in incense for the morning; a sleep-drunken lark soared occasionally into the still heavens with a loud day in her throat; over the dark meadows and bushes the dew had already been sprinkled, whose jewel-sea was to burn before the sun; and in the north floated the purple pennons of Aurora, as she sailed toward morning. With an exalting power the thought seized the youth, that this very minute was measuring millions of little and long lives, and the walk of the sap-caterpillar and the flight of the sun, and that this very same time was being lived through by the worm and God, from worlds to worlds, through the universe. "O God!" he exclaimed, "how glorious it is to exist!"
Charles merely clung, with the drooping, heavy feathers of the night-bird, to the cheerful constellations around him. "Happy for thee," said he, "that thou canst be thus, and that the sphinx in thy bosom still sleeps. Thou knowest not what I am about to do. I knew a wretch who could portray her right well. In the cavern of man's breast, said he, lies a monster on its four claws, with upturned Madonna's face, and looks round smiling, for a time, and so does man too. Suddenly it springs up, buries its claws into the breast, rends it with lion's-tail and hard wings, and roots and rushes and roars, and everywhere blood runs down the torn cavern of the breast. All at once it stretches itself out again, bloody, and smiles away again with the fair Madonna's face. O, he looked all bloodless, the wretch! because the beast so fed upon him and thirstily lapped at his heart."
"Horrible!" said Albano; "and yet I do not quite understand thee." The moon at this moment lifted herself up, together with a flock of clouds that lay darkly camped along her sides, and she drew a storm-wind after her, which drove them among the stars. Charles went on more wildly: "In the beginning, the wretch found it as yet good: he had as yet sound pains and pleasures, real sins and virtues; but as the monster smiled and tore faster and faster, and he continued to alternate more and more rapidly between pleasure and pain, good and evil; and when blasphemies and obscene images crept into his prayers, and he could neither convert nor harden himself; then did he lie there, in a dreary exhaustion of bleeding, in the tepid, gray, dry mist-banks of life, and thus was dying all the time he lived.—Why weepest thou? Knowest thou that wretch?" "No," said Albano, mildly. "I am he!" "Thou? Terrible God, not thou!" "O, it is I; and though thou despisest me, thou wilt be what I ... No, my innocent one, I say it not. See, even now the sphinx rises again. O pray with me, help me, that I may not be obliged to sin,—only not be obliged! I must drink, I must debauch, I must be a hypocrite,—I am a hypocrite at this moment." Zesara saw the rigid eye, the pale, shattered face, and, in a rage of love, shook him with both arms, and stammered, with deep emotion, "By the Almighty! this is not true! thou art indeed so tender and pale and unhappy and innocent."
"Rosy-cheek," said Charles, "I seem to thee pure and bright as yonder orb; but she too, like me, casts a long shadow up toward heaven." Zesara let go of him, took a long look toward the sublime, dark Tartarus, encompassing Elysium like a funeral train, and pressed away bitter tears, which flowed at the remembrance how he had found therein his first friend, who was now melting away at his side. Just then the night-wind tore up a fir-tree which had been killed by the wood-caterpillar, and Albano pointed silently to the crashing tree. Charles shrieked: "Yes, that is I!" "Ah, Charles, have I then lost thee to-day?" said the guiltless friend, with infinite pain; and the fair stars of spring fell like hissing sparks into his wounds.