"The small-pox has altered you since you left home," said Volkmar.
"Very likely. I have had the small-pox since I left my home."
Volkmar at once placed his house, his servants, his purse, at the disposal of his guest, and his offer was readily accepted.
It is now advisable to turn back and explain the situation, by relating the early history of this person, who passed under the name of Karl Marbitz, an armourer; but whom a good number of people suspected of being something other than what he gave himself out to be, though only Volkmar and Pöckel and one or two others supposed him to be the Crown Prince of Saxony.
Sophie Sabine Apitzsch was born at Lunzenau in Saxony in 1692, was well brought up, kept to school, and learned to write orthographically, and to have a fair general knowledge of history and geography. When she left school she was employed by her father in his trade, which was that of an armourer. She was tall and handsome, somewhat masculine—in after years a Cossack got into her boots—had the small-pox, which, however, only slightly disfigured her. In 1710 she had a suitor, a gamekeeper, Melchior Leonhart. But Sophie entertained a rooted dislike to marriage, and she kept her lover off for three years, till her father peremptorily ordered her to marry Melchior, and fixed the day for the wedding. Then Sophie one night got out of her own clothing, stepped into her father's best suit, and walked away in the garments of a man, and shortly afterwards appeared in Anspach under a feigned name, as a barber's assistant. Here she got into difficulties with the police, as she had no papers of legitimation, and to escape them, enlisted. She carried a musket for a month only, deserted, and resumed her vagabond life in civil attire, as a barber's assistant, and came to Leipzig, where she lodged at the Golden Cock. How she acquired the art, and how those liked it on whose faces she made her experiments with the razor, we are not told.
At the Golden Cock lodged an athletic lady of the name of Anna Franke, stout, muscular, and able to lift great weights with her teeth, and with a jerk throw them over her shoulders. Anna Franke gave daily exhibitions of her powers, and on the proceeds maintained herself and her daughter, a girl of seventeen. The stout and muscular lady also danced on a tight rope, which with her bounces acted like a taut bowstring, projecting the athlete high into the air.
The Fräulein Franke very speedily fell in love with the fine young barber, and proposed to her mother that Herr Karl should be taken into the concern, as he would be useful to stretch the ropes, and go round for coppers. Sophie was nothing loth to have her inn bill paid on these terms, but when finally the bouncing mother announced that her daughter's hand was at the disposal of Karl, then the situation became even more embarrassing than that at home from which Sophie had run away. The barber maintained her place as long as she could, but at last, when the endearments of the daughter became oppressive, and the urgency of the mother for speedy nuptials became vexatious, she pretended that the father, who was represented as a well-to-do citizen of Hamburg, must first be consulted. On this plea Sophie borrowed of Mother Franke the requisite money for her journey and departed, promising to return in a few weeks. Instead of fulfilling her promise, Sophie wrote to ask for a further advance of money, and when this was refused, disappeared altogether from the knowledge of the athlete and her daughter.
On this second flight from marriage, Sophie Apitzsch met with an armourer named Karl Marbitz, and by some means or other contrived to get possession of his pass, leaving him instead a paper of legitimation made out under the name of Karl Gottfried, which old Mother Franke had induced the police to grant to the young barber who was engaged to marry her daughter.
In June 1714, under the name of Marbitz, Sophie appeared among the Erz-Gebirge, the chain of mountains that separate Saxony from Bohemia, and begged her way from place to place, pretending to be a schoolmaster out of employ. After rambling about for some time, she took up her quarters with a baker at Elterlein. Here it was that for the first time a suspicion was aroused that she was a person of greater consequence than she gave out. The rumour reached the nearest magistrate that there was a mysterious stranger there who wore a ribbon and star of some order, and he at once went to the place to make inquiries, but found that Sophie had neither ribbon nor order, and that her papers declared in proper form who and what she was. At this time she fell ill at the baker's house, and the man, perhaps moved by the reports abroad concerning her, was ready to advance her money to the amount of £6 or £7. When recovered, she left the village where she had been ill, and went to another one, where she took up her abode with another baker, named Fischer, whom she helped in his trade, or went about practising upon the huntsman's horn.
This amusement it was which brought her into trouble. Possibly she may not have known that the horn was a reserved instrument that might not be played by the ignoble.