“I give to Frederick von Stolzenfels the free use of my horses and dogs, with right of chase over my estates.
“I annex to the present will a Tyrolese air; I desire that it may be engraved on my tomb and serve as my epitaph.”
After listening to this strange document, which they declared worthy to have proceeded from a lunatic asylum, the ladies had no appetite for Master Gottlieb’s collation. The major would gladly have tried the contents of the cobwebbed bottles, but his wife dragged him away. Frederick sprang upon his horse and galloped off, taking with him upon his boots the portraits of Isaac and the notary. This functionary, finding himself deserted by his guests, called in his head clerk to help him to drink the health of the absent legatee.
Poor, well-meaning, simple-minded Count Sigismund would have turned in his grave had he known all the mischief and unhappiness, envy, hatred, and discord, of which his extraordinary will sowed the seed and gave the signal. The journey from Munich to Hildesheim was, for Franz and Edith, a series of enchanting dreams. There was but one drawback to their joy; Spiegel had refused to accompany them. “No more drudgery, no more lessons!” Müller had enthusiastically exclaimed, when a letter from Master Gottlieb, expressing a hope of the continuance of the Hildesheim patronage, and enclosing a copy of the will, tied with blue ribbons, confirmed the intimation of good fortune he had already gleaned from a newspaper paragraph. “The world belongs to us; we are kings of the earth! You shall paint pictures, I will compose symphonies and operas; we will fill Germany with our fame.” And he formed innumerable projects. Their life thenceforward was to be a fairy scene, a delightful and perpetual alternation of refined enjoyments and artistic toil. Edith partook her husband’s enthusiasm; Spiegel at first said nothing, and when he did speak he gave his friends to understand that he could not share their prosperity. He did not like new faces; he preferred the cottage at Munich to the abode of a castle, and was proof against all entreaties. Franz and Edith secretly resolved to buy the little house as a gift to their friend. In nine months they would return to see him, and perhaps, when they again set out for Hildesheim, he would consent to accompany them. Whilst preparing for departure, and burning useless papers, Franz laid his hand upon the only symphony he had found time to write. Carefully turning over its leaves, with a disdainful air, he was about to toss it into the fire, when Spiegel seized his arm and rescued the composition.
Müller had written to the Hildesheim steward to announce his arrival, and to forbid all pomp, ceremony, and public rejoicings on the occasion. He thought his instructions too literally carried out, when, upon reaching, some hours after nightfall, the huge gates of the castle, all decorated with stags’ horns, boars’ tusks, and wolves’ heads, he found no servant to receive him, not a light on the walls or in the windows, not a torch in the gloomy avenues of the park. After the postilion had cracked his whip and wound his horn for the better part of half an hour, a glimmering light appeared, a clanking of keys was heard, and the gates, slowly opening, disclosed the sour visage of Wurm the steward, muttering maledictions on the untimely visitors. Upon learning who they were, and at the rather sharp injunction of Müller, who was exasperated at the delay, he made what haste he could to awaken the servants, and ushered his new master and mistress into their apartments—immense rooms, nearly bare of furniture; for, even during Sigismund’s lifetime, the Stolzenfels and Bildmann, taking advantage of his frequent absence of mind, and from the castle, had stripped that part of the edifice he had reserved for his own use. Edith mentally contrasted the vast gloomy halls with her snug abode at Munich, and thought it would have been but kind had the ladies Stolzenfels and Mrs Bildmann been there to receive her. But a night’s rest, a brilliant morning, and the view of the immense lawns and rich foliage of the park, effaced the first unpleasant impression, and, having previously sent to know when they could be received, she and her husband presented themselves in the apartments of Hedwige and Ulrica. On their entrance, the two old ladies, who were seated in the embrasure of a window, half rose from their seats, resumed them almost immediately, and pointed to chairs with a gesture rather disdainful than polite. Poor Edith, who, in the innocence of her heart, had expected smiling countenance and a friendly welcome, felt herself frozen by their vinegar aspect. She turned red, then pale, and knew not what to say. Müller, without noticing the ladies’ looks, recited a little speech he had prepared for the occasion, expressive of his gratitude to Count Sigismund for having bequeathed him, in addition to his estates, his amiable family. He begged and insisted that they would change nothing in their mode of life, &c. &c. Why should they change anything? was Ulrica’s sharp and haughty reply; the count had left them by his will what he had given them in his lifetime; they had their rights and asked nothing beyond them. Hedwige pitched it in rather a lower key. Their tastes were very simple. They had sought neither applause nor luxury at Hildesheim. Count Sigismund had always put his carriage and horses at their disposal. Müller hoped they would continue to make use of them. They were lovers of solitude, Hedwige continued, of silence and meditation. With Count Sigismund’s consent they had planted a quickset hedge round a little corner of the park—not more than two or three acres. It would pain them, she confessed, to give up this little enclosure, whither they repaired to indulge their evening reveries. Franz eagerly assured them that none should disturb them in their retreat. Having obtained these assurances, and repelled, with chilling stiffness, Edith’s warm-hearted advances, the amiable spinsters relapsed into silence, which all their visitors’ efforts were insufficient to induce them to break, until the upset of a table of old china, occasioned by the gambols of Herman and a black cat, effectually roused them from their assumed apathy. The Müllers beat a retreat and went to call on Major Bildmann and his wife, whom they surprised in the midst of a domestic squabble—a circumstance of itself sufficient, had others been wanting, to secure them a surly reception. Franz’s mild and gentle bearing encouraged the major to assume his most impertinent tone, whilst his falcon-faced spouse ventured offensive inuendoes as to the real motives of Count Sigismund’s will—inuendoes whose purport was utterly unsuspected by the pure-hearted Müllers. Here, too, there was an enclosure in the case, where the major cultivated the flowers his dear Dorothy preferred, and where the infant Isaac loved to disport himself. As an old soldier, Major Bildmann added, he loved the chase, which was the image of war. The count had allowed him the range of his preserves. Müller eagerly confirmed him in all his privileges. On quitting the Bildmann wing he found Wurm waiting for him to pass the servants in review. He made them an affecting little speech, by which they seemed very little affected. Then Wurm named them. There were Mrs Bildmann’s waitingmaid and the major’s valet, the servants of the ladies Stolzenfels, the cooks of the right and left wings, Isaac’s nurse, Major Bildmann’s butler, Captain Frederick’s grooms and huntsmen, &c. &c. Müller inquired for his own servants—those that had been Count Sigismund’s. They were all before him. The two wings had swallowed up the body. Wurm felt secretly surprised at a musician’s needing servants when the count had done without them. Müller dryly informed him that Count Sigismund’s servants were his, and that he made him responsible for their attention to his service. He said nothing to Edith of this strange scene, and tried to dissipate the painful impressions she had brought away from their two visits, by praising the major’s military frankness and the aristocratic bearing of the sisters. But he was at a loss to explain why the apartments of the Stolzenfels and Bildmanns were richly and sumptuously furnished and decorated, whilst those the owners of the castle occupied exhibited little beside bare walls. Meanwhile the right and left wings, between whom there had been a sort of hollow alliance since the reading of the will, assembled in conclave. Never was there such a voiding of venom. The self-same idea had occurred to all these disappointed and charitable relations. Edith’s beauty at once explained the count’s frequent absence from home and his unjust will. She was the syren that had led him astray. Little Margaret was his very image. It was a crying shame, a burning scandal. The old maids clasped their hands and rolled their eyes. Ulrica was for attacking the will on the ground of immoral influence and captivation. The major had always been of the same opinion, but Frederick would not agree, and nothing should induce the major to fight a member of his family. The fact was, notwithstanding his Bobadil airs, Major Bildmann had very little fancy for fighting with anybody. The council broke up, all its members declaring they would quit the castle sullied by the presence of these adventurers—all fully resolved to remain and to wait the course of events.
We must compress into a few lines the leading incidents of the second half of Un Héritage. Müller had not been a month at the castle, when great annoyances succeeded to the petty disagreeables he had encountered on his first arrival. Master Wolfgang the Hildesheim lawyer was his evil genius. There was a certain lawsuit, that had already lasted through three generations, in which, as Count Sigismund’s heir, he found himself entangled. The whole matter in dispute was but half an acre of land, which Müller would gladly have abandoned, but Wolfgang proved to him, as clear as day, the impropriety of so doing, the disrespect to the memory of the late count, and so forth—and, the most cogent argument of all, he exhibited to him the sum total of the costs he would have to pay if he admitted himself vanquished. It was an alarming figure, and ready money was not abundant with Müller, whom the Stolzenfels and Bildmanns dunned for their first year’s annuity and for the legacy to little Isaac; who had to pay for extensive repairs of the castle, for the costly mausoleum which, in the first effusion of his gratitude, he had ordered for Count Sigismund, and various other charges. So the lawsuit went on—the delight of Master Wolfgang, and a daily drain upon Müller’s purse. The harvest was bad, the farmers asked for time, and grumbled when worse terms than their own were proposed to them. Careless Count Sigismund had spoiled all around him by letting them do as they liked, and Müller’s greater activity and vigilance, and his attempts to check fraud and peculation, speedily earned him the ill-will of the whole neighbourhood. Gentle-hearted Edith, anxious to expend a portion of her sudden wealth in improving the condition of the poor, was soon disgusted by their ingratitude, and was utterly at a loss to understand the chilling looks, ironical smiles, and mysterious whisperings of which she was the object whenever she went beyond the limits of her own park, to which she soon confined herself. Her servants showed no sense of the kindness with which she treated them; they, too, had adopted and spread the vile rumours first set abroad by the malice of the two vixen spinsters and of the Bildmanns, with respect to the count’s real motives for bequeathing his estates to the Müllers. Fortunately it was impossible for Edith, who was purity itself, ever to suspect the real cause of the ill-will shown to her. Captain Frederick, when his regimental duties permitted him to visit the castle, discovered at a first interview, with a rake’s usual clear-sightedness in such matters, the utter falseness of the injurious reports in circulation. He became a constant visitor to the Müllers, and was in fact their only friend and resource in the solitude in which they lived; for the neighbouring squires, the hobereaus of the country around, had not returned Müller’s visits, nor taken any notice of him beyond attacking him at law; some upon a question of water-power, which he had innocently diminished by winding a stream that ran through his grounds, others for damage done to their fields, by the trespasses of the Hildesheim hounds, followed by Captain Frederick and his huntsmen. Nor was this all—there was discord yet nearer home: Müller’s children, having trespassed upon the Bildmanns’ private garden, were brutally ejected by the major, whom Müller angrily reproached. The major bullied and insisted upon satisfaction, which Franz, exasperated by a long series of annoyances, was perfectly willing to give him, and a duel would have ensued had not the major, when he saw that the musician, as he contemptuously called him, meant to fight, sent an apology. It was accepted, but next day Müller ordered his three gardeners to root up and clear away the hedges of the Stolzenfels and Bildmann enclosures. The knaves remonstrated and finally refused, and, when dismissed, they refused to go, alleging that the late count’s will deprived Müller of the power of sending them away. More work for the lawyers. Müller sent for labourers, and the hedges disappeared. Notices of action from the ladies Stolzenfels and Major Bildmann. The villain Wolfgang chuckled and rubbed his hands, upon which he had now six lawsuits for Müller’s account. In the count’s crack-brained will, drawn up by himself, without legal advice, the letter was everywhere at variance with the spirit. Müller’s apartment was encumbered with law papers; he could not sit down to his piano, to seek oblivion of his cares in his beloved art, without being interrupted by Wolfgang’s parchment physiognomy. As for composition, it was out of the question: he had no time for it, nor was his harassed mind attuned to harmony. He became morose and fanciful, jealous of the hussar’s attention to Edith, who, for her part, grieved to see her husband so changed, and sighed for the cottage at Munich, where Spiegel, meanwhile, had worked hard, had sold some pictures, had paid the rent that Franz, in the midst of his troubles, had forgotten to remit to him, and had purchased, with the fruits of his own toil and talent, the little dwelling of which, when their prosperity first burst upon them, the Müllers had planned to make him a present. The contrast was striking between anticipation and realisation.
No schoolboy ever more eagerly longed for “breaking-up” day, than did Müller for the termination of his nine month’s compulsory abode at Hildesheim. It came at last, and he and Edith and their children were free to quit the scene of strife and weariness, and to return to Munich and to Spiegel. On making up the accounts of the year, Müller found that, out of the whole princely revenue of the estates, he had but a thousand florins left. He had lived little better than at Munich (much less happily), and had committed no extravagance; annuities, legacies, repairs, monument, did not account for half the sum expended; all the rest had gone in law expenses. There remained about enough to pay travelling charges to Munich. Müller sent for Wolfgang, forbade him to begin any new lawsuit in his absence, and departed. He found a warm welcome at the cottage. Spiegel received his friends with open arms, and three happy months passed rapidly away. Upon the last day, when Edith and Franz were looking ruefully forward to their return to Hildesheim’s grandeur and countless disagreeables, Spiegel insisted upon their accompanying him to the performance of a new symphony, concerning which the musical world of Munich was in a state of considerable excitement. The piece, it was mysteriously related, was from the pen of a deceased composer, was of remarkable originality and beauty, and had been casually discovered amongst a mass of old papers. The concert-room was crowded. At the first bars of the music, Müller thought he recognised familiar sounds, and presently every doubt was dissipated. It was his own composition—the despised symphony he had been about to destroy, but which Spiegel had rescued. The audience, at the close of each part, were rapturous in their applause. When the finale had been played, the composer’s name was called for with acclamations. The leader of the orchestra advanced, and proclaimed that of Franz Müller.
A few days later, Master Gottlieb the notary received a letter from the lord of Hildesheim. “According to the stipulations of the will,” Müller wrote, “I am bound to inhabit the castle of Hildesheim for nine months in the year. I remain at Munich and forfeit my right to the property.” Forthwith began a monster lawsuit, one of the finest Master Wolfgang had known in the whole course of his experience. It was between the Bildmanns and the Stolzenfels. It lasted ten years. The major and Dorothy died before it was decided, Isaac fell from a tree, when stealing fruit, and broke his neck. The Stolzenfels triumphed. The hussar redoubled his extravagance. The estate, already encumbered with law expenses, was sold to pay his debts. Ulrica and Hedwige died in poverty.
It ought surely not to have been difficult for practised dramatists to construct a pleasant and piquant comedy out of the leading idea and plentiful incidents of this amusing novel, which is by no means the less to be esteemed because it boldly deviates from the long-established routine, which demands a marriage as the wind-up of every book of the class. It is much more common in France than in England for play-writers to seek their subjects in novels of the day, and it is then customary, often indispensable, to take great liberties both with plot and characters, and sometimes to retain little besides the main idea of the book. Upon that idea there is of course no prohibition against improving, but authors who vary it for the worse, manifestly do themselves a double injury, because the public, familiar with the merits of the book, are disgusted to find it deteriorated in the play. They look for something better, not worse, in the second elaboration of the subject, and certainly they have a right to do so, and to be dissatisfied when the contrary is the case. In the present instance, a most unpleasant play has been based upon a good novel. In Emile Augier, M. Sandeau has taken to himself a dangerous collaborateur. He should have dramatised Un Héritage unassisted—as he dramatised, with such happy results, his novel of Mademoiselle de la Seiglière. That is a most successful instance of the French style of adaptation to the stage. There, too, as in the present case, great liberties have been taken. In two out of the four acts, scarcely anything is to be traced of the novel, which has as tragical an ending as the comedy has a cheerful and pleasant one. But the whole tenor of the play was genial and sympathetic. In the Pierre de Touche, as the present comedy is called, the reverse is the case, and no wonder that its cynical and exaggerated strain jarred on the feelings of the usually quiet audience at the Française, and elicited hisses rarely heard within those decorous walls, where silence and empty benches are the only tokens the public usually give of its disapprobation. From our acquaintance with M. Sandeau’s writings, we do not think that he would of himself have perpetrated such a repulsive picture of human nature as he has produced in combination with M. Augier. They have obliterated or distorted most of the best features of the novel. In Un Héritage, the character of Franz Müller is at once pleasing and natural. He is not represented as perfect—he has his failings and weaknesses like any other mortal, and they are exhibited in the book, although we have not, in the outline we have traced of it, had occasion to give them prominence. But his heart is sound to the last. Wealth may momentarily bewilder, but it does not pervert him. He is true to his affections, and has the sense and courage to accept honourable toil as preferable to a fortune embittered by anxiety and dissension. The reader cannot help respecting him, and feeling pained at his countless vexations and annoyances. No such sympathy is possible with the Franz of the play, who is the most contemptible of mortals. A more unpleasant character was probably never introduced into any book, and it is untrue to nature, for it has not a single redeeming point. The authors have personified and concentrated in it the essences of heartlessness, selfishness, and of the most paltry kind of pride. Somewhat indolent, and with a latent spark of envy in his nature, the needy artist, converted into a millionaire, suddenly displays his evil instincts. Their growth is as supernaturally rapid as that of noxious weeds in a tropical swamp. The play opens in the cottage at Munich. Edith, Franz’s cousin, is not yet married to him. An orphan, she had been brought up by his father, at whose death Franz took charge of her. She was then a child, and Franz and Spiegel hardly perceived that she had become a woman until they were reminded of it by the passion with which she inspired both of them. Spiegel, a noble character, generously sacrifices to his friend’s happiness his own unsuspected love. Edith (the names are changed in the play, but we retain them to avoid confusion) is affianced to her cousin, and on the eve of marriage. Just then comes the fortune. The authors have substituted for the Bildmanns and Stolzenfels an elderly spendthrift baron and an intriguing margravine and her pretty daughter. The love passages in the life of the deceased count are cancelled, and he is represented as an eccentric old gentleman, passionately fond of music, and cherishing a great contempt for his very distant relations, to whom he leaves only a moderate annuity. They have scarcely become acquainted with Franz when they discern the weak points in his character and conspire to profit by them. Treated with cutting contempt, as a mere parvenu, by the haughty nobility of Bavaria, Franz’s pride boils over, and he consents to be adopted by the baron and converted into the Chevalier de Berghausen, at the immoderate price of the payment of the old roué nobleman’s debts. He finds Spiegel a wearisome Mentor; to his diseased vision Edith appears awkward contrasted with the courtly dames he now encounters. Their marriage is postponed from week to week, by reason of the journeys and other steps necessary to establish Franz in the ranks of the nobility of the land. Titled, and with armorial bearings that date from the crusades, how much more fitting an alliance, the baron perfidiously suggests, would be that of the margravine, who graciously condescends to intimate her possible acceptance of him as a son-in-law. We are shown the gangrene of selfishness and vanity daily spreading its corruption through his soul. He quarrels with his honest, generous friend, slights his affianced bride, and finally falls completely into the clutches of the intriguers who beset him. His very dog, poor faithful Spark, (his dog and Spiegel’s)—which, as the painter, with tears in his eyes and a cheek pale with anger and honest indignation, passionately reminds him—had slept on his feet and been his comfort and companion in adversity—is killed by his order because he did not appreciate the difference between castle and cottage, but took his ease upon the dainty satin sofas at Hildesheim as upon the rush mat at Munich. Edith, compelled to despise the man she had loved, preserves her womanly dignity, and breaks off the projected marriage just as the last glimmer of honour and affection are on the point of being extinguished in her cousin’s bosom by the dictates of a despicable vanity. The curtain falls, leaving him in the hands of his hollow friends, and allowing the spectator to foresee the union of Edith and Spiegel. Not one kindly touch of natural feeling redeems Franz’s faithlessness to his friend, and to his love his ingratitude—for he would many a day have been hungry, if not houseless, but for the generous toil of Spiegel, who had devoted himself to the drudgery of teaching, that Franz might have leisure to mature the genius for which his partial friend gave him exaggerated credit—his false pride and his ridiculous vanity. He is left rich, but miserable. That which he has wilfully lost can be dispelled neither by the enjoyments wealth procures, nor by the false friends who hang on him but to plunder him. In their vindication, the authors insist on “the terrible morality” of their denouement. We admit it, but do not the less persist in the opinion that their play, although by no means devoid of wit and talent, leaves a most painful and disagreeable impression upon the mind. It presents the paradoxical and complicated phenomenon of a comedy which has been censured by press and public and yet continues to be performed; which draws tolerably numerous audiences, and is invariably received with symptoms of disapprobation.