My sister tried to comfort me by circumstantially arguing that if those of higher rank were to be saved, a veil must also be cast over the faults of the more lowly. All this was of no avail. She had scarcely left than I again abandoned myself to my grief, and ever recalled alternately the images both of my affection and passion and of the present and possible misfortune. I repeated to myself tale after tale, saw only unhappiness following unhappiness, and did not fail in particular to make Gretchen and myself truly wretched.
The family friend had ordered me to remain in my room, and have nothing to do with any one but the family. This was just what I wanted, for I found myself best alone. My mother and sister visited me from time to time, and did not fail to assist me vigorously with all sorts of good consolation; nay, even on the second day they came in the name of my father, who was now better informed, to offer me a perfect amnesty, which indeed I gratefully accepted; but the proposal that I should go out with him and look at the insignia of the Empire, which were now exposed to the curious, I stubbornly rejected, and I asserted that I wanted to know nothing either of the world or of the Roman Empire till I was informed how that distressing affair, which for me could have no further consequences, had turned out for my poor acquaintance. They had nothing to say on this head, and left me alone. Yet the next day some further attempts were made to get me out of the house and excite in me a sympathy for the public ceremonies. In vain! neither the great gala-day, nor what happened on the occasion of so many elevations of rank, nor the public table of the Emperor and King,—in short, nothing could move me. The Elector of the Palatinate might come and wait on both their Majesties; these might visit the Electors; the last electoral sitting might be attended for the despatch of business in arrear, and the renewal of the electoral union;—nothing could call me forth from my passionate solitude. I let the bells ring for the rejoicings, the Emperor repair to the Capuchin church, the Electors and Emperor depart, without on that account moving one step from my chamber. The final cannonading, immoderate as it might be, did not arouse me, and as the smoke of the powder dispersed, and the sound died away, so had all this glory vanished from my soul.
Goethe's illness.
I now experienced no satisfaction but in chewing the cud of my misery, and in a thousandfold imaginary multiplication of it. My whole inventive faculty, my poetry and rhetoric, had cast themselves on this diseased spot, and threatened, precisely by means of this vitality, to involve body and soul into an incurable disorder. In this melancholy condition nothing more seemed to me worth a desire, nothing worth a wish. An infinite yearning, indeed, seized me at times to know how it had gone with my poor friends and my beloved, what had been the result of a stricter scrutiny, how far they were implicated in those crimes, or had been found guiltless. This also I circumstantially painted to myself in the most various ways, and did not fail to hold them as innocent and truly unfortunate. Sometimes I longed to see myself freed from this uncertainty, and wrote vehemently threatening letters to the family friend, insisting that he should not withhold from me the further progress of the affair. Sometimes I tore them up again, from the fear of learning my unhappiness quite distinctly, and of losing the principal consolation with which hitherto I had alternately tormented and supported myself.
Thus I passed both day and night in great disquiet, in raving and lassitude, so that I felt happy at last when a bodily illness seized me with considerable violence, when they had to call in the help of a physician, and think of every way to quiet me. They supposed that they could do it generally by the sacred assurance that all who were more or less involved in the guilt had been treated with the greatest forbearance, that my nearest friends, being as good as innocent, had been dismissed with a slight reprimand, and that Gretchen had retired from the city and had returned to her own home. They lingered the most over this last point, and I did not take it in the best part; for I could discover in it, not a voluntary departure, but only a shameful banishment. My bodily and mental condition was not improved by this; my distress now first really began, and I had time enough to torment myself by picturing the strangest romance of sad events, and an inevitably tragical catastrophe.
[1] The diminutive of Margaret.—Trans.
[2] That is to say, a poem written for a certain occasion, as a wedding, funeral, &c. The German word is "Gelegenheitsgedicht."—Trans.
[3] The "new Abelard" is St. Preux, in the Nouvelle Heloise of Rosseau.—Trans.
[4] A class of attendants dressed in Hungarian costume.—Trans.