But it stopped not here. Hardly had her Albano appeared, when the thorn-girdle and hair-shirt of the pure Minister was made disproportionately more rough and thorny, and the strongest requirements, namely, gifts, redoubled, in order that the poor Joseph might the more speedily assail her honor and therefore run into his ruin, which should be bait for the Count. By this time he had been already brought along so far that he wove and knotted in her flying hair (to him poisonous snake-hair),—he must needs blow out soap-bubbles of sighs from his pipe,—he must needs quite often be beside himself; yes, he must even (if he would not see himself chased away as a hypocritical rascal) be half-sensual, although still decent enough. Meanwhile he was not to be tempted into a temptation by the Devil himself. Whenever he even thought of the subject, shuddering, how the least misstep might hurl him from his ministerial post, then he would as soon have let himself be impaled and quartered as bewitched. For a third party, not for these two,—they were the sufferers,—it would perhaps have been a feast, to have seen how they (if I may use a too low comparison) resembled a pair of silk stockings drawn over each other, which for and by each other, when one keeps them distended[[41]] at a certain distance, ethereally blow themselves and fill, but immediately collapse, flat and flabby, when they touch each other.
Of course, in the long run, it fell heavily upon the old statesman to have to leap along before the dancing pageantry of love-gods as their arch-master, tackled into the triumphal car of the Cyprian,—a flower-garland on his state-peruke, in his eyes two Vauclusa fountains, the cavity of his breast a choked-up Dido's cave, wearing in his button-hole an arrow in a heart, or a heart on an arrow, and faring toward the capitol, in order there, after the Roman fashion, not so much to sacrifice as to be sacrificed. Nothing except the tin boxes which the government officers and exchequer messengers stowed away for him at home could fan fresh and cool again the stalemated man, who would fain be a checkmated one.
He read with her Catullus, she with him the better pictures out of the Prince's cabinet; it was allowed him to reward her by his Latinity for her artistic favors: but he remained, nevertheless, as he was.
When women wish to carry a point, and find hindrances constantly recurring, they grow at last blind and wild, and dare anything and everything. The tour to Italy approached so fast; still the Minister was no nearer to letting go his high consideration for his beloved,—although from just her own motive, that of the tour, with the nearness of which he animated himself to a cheerful endurance of so short a flame. Her passion for the Count increased with the Count's tranquillity, because coldness strengthens strong love, just as physical coldness makes strong people more vigorous and weak ones more puny. Froulay, as an old man, was, as it seemed, capable of creeping along so for a whole age to his object, without making one unnecessary leap, since old people, like ships, always move slower the longer they have been going, and on similar grounds, namely, that both, by the adhesion of filth, weeds, barnacles, and the like, have become unwieldy. In short, the Princess at last ceased to ask for anything, but matters went thus:—
The Prince had gone a journey, the Princess had been invited as god-mother out into the country. The castellain on one of her country castles, who had already the year before invited the Minister, had not been restrained by bashfulness from making his way still farther up on this rope-ladder, with his descendant under his arm, and up there on the throne laying his child of the land in the arms of her, the Princess herself. Princes love to let themselves down—on thin silk-worm threads—(as well as up); they value the good-natured, stupid people, and would fain in this way raise somewhat the poor creeping dwarf-beans,—for they well know how little it matters,—and, so to speak, pole them and boot them by means of the leg of the princely chair. Beside this, the Minister had been invited as grand-god-father (so called). The autumn day was only a brighter, more perfect spring, and the autumnal night stood under a brilliant full moon. Courts always long so exceedingly to be away in the country, among the idyls of murmuring rivulets, sighing branches, and tree-tops, and bleating Swisseries, and farmers; Courts—that is, courtiers, court-dames and official chamberlains'-staves, and others—yearn so for the society of human beings; as beasts are driven by the December hunger, so does a noble hunger drive them down from the throne-mountains into the flat plains; not that they would fly from ennui, but they desire only a different kind, as their very pastime consists in the abbreviation and alternation of their ennui.
Hardly had the Court appeased its first longing for the people with whom it stood for half a quarter of an hour on a confidential, conversational footing, when it came to itself again, and dispersed itself through the princely garden, in order to consume full as long a time in satisfying its longing after nature. A sponsoress of the sponsoress promised Christianity in the stead of Princess and child. The Princess herself attached the Minister to her as a chamberlain. The grand-god-father looked out into the prospect of a d—d long evening, in which he should be obliged to parade round her procession-banner. For the enjoyment of the evening there was a concert, and for the enjoyment of the concert card playing had been arranged; and for the enjoyment of the latter, the Princess had seated herself alone with Froulay, in order, during the general playing of cards and instruments, to have some inaudible conversation with him. Suddenly the two pounds which were hung up in his breast—for no heart, according to the anatomists, weighs more than that—became two hundred-weight heavier, when she asked him whether he was steadfast and could confide in her and dare for her. He swore that, if only as Princess, she might expect of his two-pounder any and every sacrifice and mark of veneration. She went on: she had some weighty things to intrust him with to-day about herself and the Prince; she wished, when the Foule was gone, to speak with him alone; he need only go up the little stairway from the side of the garden to the door of the library-chamber; this was open; in the poetical bookcase on the left side was a spring in the wall, the pressure of which would open to him the tapestry door of the apartment, where he was to await her.
Immediately she rose, presuming upon an affirmative. How it fared now with the two pounds of his sixty-four-ounce-heart can gratify none but his deadly enemy to realize. So much lay written before him with long, thick, stony letters, as on an epitaphium, namely, that after a few hours, when the other lords, in other respects still greater sinners than he, could snore away quietly in the pleasant ministerial houses which formed the court of the Palace, that then for him, innocent knave, the wolf-hour, that is to say, the shepherd's hour,[[42]] would so soon strike, when he on the most flowery meadow must kneel beneath the butcher's knife. But he—angry that his faith in female and princely impudence should prove a soothsayer—made silently all kinds of oaths to himself, that, even if as much were imposed upon him as on the greatest saints and universal philosophers, he would nevertheless behave like both, for instance, like old Zeno and Franz.
The Princess sought him all the evening less than usual. At last he took his respectful leave of the whole court, but with the prospect of creeping, not, like them, under silk quilts, but under cold bowers. He even marched—sure of himself—up the stairway, opened the library-chamber, found the spring, touched it, and stepped through the tapestry door into the princely—bedchamber. "It is certain, then," said he, and cursed about him inwardly to his heart's content, lying prostrate and crushed quite flat beneath the love-letter weight. In the side chamber on the left hand he already heard her and a chambermaid, who was undressing her. On the right the door of a second but lighted chamber stood ajar. He stood long in doubt whether he should step into that, or stay where he was under the light-screen of a dark corner. At last he laid hold of the protection of night. During his suspense and her disrobing, he had time to rehearse or read over his part; now he came to an agreement with himself, in case of necessity,—and if he should find himself pushed too hard—and all the more, as the place would speak more against her than against him, inasmuch as every one must needs ask, whether he could otherwise have possibly gained admission,—in such a case of necessity, where only the choice between a satire and a satyr was left him, he determined to transform himself on the spot into a respectful—Faun.
Directly the Princess strode in, but in the direction of the illuminated chamber. "I have no further occasion for thee," she called back to the chambermaid. "Diable!" screamed she, in the bedchamber, spying out the tall Minister; "who stands there? Hanna, a light! Ciel!" she continued, recognizing him, but continuing to speak French, because Hanna understood nothing of that. "Mais, Monsieur! Me voila donc compromise! Quelle méprise! Vous vous etes trompé de chambres! Pardonnéz, Monsieur, que je sauve les déhors de mon sexe et de mon rang. Comment avez-vous-pu—" She uttered all this, perhaps, by way of blinding the German witness, with an angry accent. The grand-godfather—who, after all previous gratifications, felt like a cock, who has gulped down many live chafers, and is now threatened with his life by their sticking in his distressed crop—kept not silence, but replied in German, opening the tapestry door, meanwhile, that he had, even as she commanded, laid the books out of the library in the lighted chamber, and had been caught in transitu. He went immediately through the tapestry; but she could hardly contain herself for terror, had the physician called in the morning, and sent back her retinue. Froulay—however much like the Spanish he found his romances, among which, according to Fisher's assertion, the thieves' literature is the best—at last did not know, himself, what to make of it.
The chambermaid had to make profession with the vow of silence, which she kept as strictly as she could, but not more so. Next morning very few alighted before their own doors, most before the doors of others, in order to land the news together with the injunction of the Princess not to make the thing éclatant, because in that case the Prince would hear of it.