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Title: Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces;

Author: Jean Paul

Translator: A. Ewing

Release date: May 19, 2011 [eBook #36164]
Most recently updated: November 8, 2021

Language: English

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Credits: Charles Bowen

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FLOWER,
FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES; ***

BOHN’S STANDARD LIBRARY.

RICHTER’S

FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES.

GEORGE BELL & SONS

LONDON: YORK ST., COVENT GARDEN
NEW YORK 66 FIFTH AVENUE, AND
BOMBAY: 53 ESPLANADE ROAD
CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON BELL & CO.

FLOWER, FRUIT AND
THORN PIECES;
OR, THE

WEDDED LIFE, DEATH, AND MARRIAGE
OF

FIRMIAN STANISLAUS SIEBENKÆS,

PARISH ADVOCATE

IN THE BURGH OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.

(A GENUINE THORN PIECE.)
BY

JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER.

Translated from the German
BY

ALEXANDER EWING.
LONDON

GEORGE BELL AND SONS

1897

[Reprinted from Stereotype plates.]

PREFACE

TO THE

SECOND EDITION.

What advantage shall I reap in giving to the world this, my new edition
of ‘Siebenkæs,’ embellished and perfected as it is with all the additions,
corrections, and improvements which it has been in my power to make?
Can I expect to be any the better for it? People will, I daresay, buy it and
read it; but not give much of their time to the study of it, nor be sufficiently
detailed and thorough in their criticism of it. The Pythia of Criticism has
hitherto been chary of her oracles to me, as the Greek Pythia was to other
inquirers; she has chewed up my laurels, instead of crowning me with them,
and prophesied little or nothing. The author very distinctly remembers
setting to work, for instance, at the second edition of his ‘Hesperus,’[1] with
his pruning-saw in his left hand and his oculist’s knife in his right, and
applying both instruments to the work to an extraordinary extent; it was in
vain, however, that he looked for anything like an appreciative notice of it,
either in literary or non-literary publications. Similarly, in all his new
editions (those of ‘Fixlein,’ the ‘Preparatory School,’ and ‘Levana,’ are
proofs and witnesses[2]), however he may set to work, hanging up new
pictures, turning some of the old ones’ faces to the wall—marching off
some ideas, relieving them by others—making characters conduct
themselves better, or worse, or hit upon better, or upon worse, ideas, as the
case may be,—the deuce a reviewer takes the least notice of it, or says a
word to the world on the subject. But in this way I learn little, am not told
where I have done pretty well, or the reverse, and am minus, perhaps, some
little bit of praise and encouragement which I may deserve.
This is how the question stands, and several consequences follow as
matters of course; the indifferent class of readers consider the author
incapable of making any critical emendations, while the enthusiastic class
think none are necessary—their common point of agreement being the
supposition that he absorbs and emits the whole thing with the same natural,
matter of course, ease and absence of effort as the Aphides, the plant-lice,

do the honey-dew, which is in such request with the bees, though, unlike the
said bees, he is not very clever at making the wax for it.
Then there are a good many who think every line should be left in the
condition in which it first flowed, or burst, spontaneously from its author’s
fancy—just as if corrections were not themselves spontaneous outbursts as
well as the other. Other readers prefer to belong to none of the above
factions and consequently belong, to some extent, to all. Were it my object
to express myself briefly, I should merely have to do so as follows:—firstly,
they say, it would be much better if he simply spoke artlessly out whatever
he finds it in his heart to say! and (if this is just what one happens to have
done), secondly, how much better would be the effect of that which he finds
it in that heart of his to say, and how much it would be improved, were it to
be done according to the canons of taste and criticism! I can express these
ideas likewise in a more roundabout form, as follows:—If a writer curbs
himself too closely, if he thinks less about the strong throb of his heart than
about the delicate arterial network and plexus of taste, and breaks up its
broad stream into fine, minute, dew-drops of the invisible perspiration of
criticism—then they say—“the fact is, that the thicker and more powerful a
jet of water is, the higher it shoots, penetrating the atmosphere, and
overcoming its resistance; whilst a more delicate jet is dissipated before it
gets half as far.” But, when the author does just the reverse of the above;
when he presses out all his overflowing heart in one gush, and lets the
blood-billows flow when and how they will, then the critics point the
following moral—doing it, however, in a metaphor other than I should have
expected of them—“A work of art is like a paper kite, which rises the
higher the more the boy pulls and holds back the string, but falls the
moment he lets it go.”
We return at last to our book. The most important of the emendations
made upon it are, perhaps, the historical; for, since the first edition
appeared, I have had the good fortune—partly because I have had an
opportunity of visiting and seeing Kuhschnappel itself, the scene of the
story (as was some time since stated in Jean Paul’s letters), partly from my
correspondence with the hero of it himself—of becoming acquainted with
family circumstances and occurrences which, probably, I could not have got
at in any other way, unless I had sat down and coolly invented them. I have
even made prize of some fresh Leibgeberiana, which I am happy to be able
now to communicate to the public.

The new edition is also improved by the banishment of all those
foreigners of words which occupied places more appropriately to be filled
by natives of the country; also by a critical cleansing away of all the
genitive final s’s of compound words. But really the labour of sweeping and
striking out letters and words all through four long volumes can be
estimated so highly by nobody, not even by Posterity, as by the sweeper and
striker-out himself.
Another of the improvements made in the Second Edition is, that I have
placed both the “Flower-pieces” at the end of the second volume[3] (for in
the former edition they came both at the beginning of the first), and that it is
no longer the first volume, but, much more appropriately, the second, which
closes with the first Fruit-piece.
And lastly, it may, perhaps, be reckoned as one of the minor
improvements, that in the two Flower-pieces—particularly in that of the
Dead Christ—I have not made any improvements, but left everything as it
was, and not attempted to scrape away any of the golden writing-sand with
which I had made the letters a little rough and illegible.
The above are the principal alterations, concerning which I should be so
glad to be favoured with the opinions of able reviewers, to the increasing of
my information, perhaps also of my reputation. But, as there could not be a
more troublesome business than the comparing of the old book with the
improved one, page by page, as it were, I have deposited in the school-book
shop the printed copy of the old edition, in which all the writing-ink
emendations of the printing-ink, that is to say, all the places which have
been written or stroked through, can be easily seen at a glance, often half
and whole pages done to death, so that it would really astonish you. Critics
not on the spot must, indeed, content themselves with laying the volumes of
each of the editions into the opposite scales of a grocer’s balance, and then
looking, when they will see how much the new edition outweighs the old.
From my strict and anxious treatment of my Second Edition, then, all critics
may form an idea of my strict and anxious treatment of my first; they may
also form an idea how much I struck out of my manuscript before printing,
when they observe how much I have struck out after printing.

Dr. Jean Paul Fr. Richter.

Bayreuth, September, 1817.

CONTENTS.

PREFACE to the Second Edition
PREFACE, with which I was obliged to put Jacob Oehrmann, General
Dealer, to sleep, because I wished to narrate the “Dog Post Days,”
and these present “Flower-Pieces,” &c., &c., to his Daughter
Wedded Life, Death, And Marriage of F. S.
Siebenkæs.
A Genuine Thorn Piece.

BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.
A Wedding Day, succeeding a day of respite—The Counterparts—Dish
Quintette in two Courses—Table-talk—Six Arms and Hands.

CHAPTER II.
Home Fun—Sundry formal Calls—The Newspaper Article—A Love
Quarrel, and a few hard words—Antipathetic ink on the wall—

Friendship of the Satirists—Government of Kuhschnappel.

Appendix to Chapter II.
Government of the Imperial Market Borough of Kuhschnappel.

CHAPTER III.
Lenette’s Honeymoon—Book Brewing—Schulrath Stiefel—Mr. Everard—
A Day before the Fair—The Red Cow—St. Michael’s Fair—The
Beggars’ Opera—Diabolical Temptation in the Wilderness, or the
Mannikin of Fashion—Autumn Joys—A New Labyrinth.

CHAPTER IV.
A Matrimonial Partie à la Guerre—Letter to that Hair Collector, the Venner
—Self-deceptions—Adam’s Marriage Sermon—Shadowing and
Over-shadowing.
End of the Preface and of the First Book.

PREFACE to the Second, Third and Fourth Books.
PREFACE by the Author of ‘Hesperus’.

BOOK II.

CHAPTER V.
The Broom and the Besom as Passion Implements—The Importance of a
Bookwriter—Diplomatic Negotiations and Discussions on the

subject of Candle Snuffing—The Pewter Cupboard—Domestic
Hardships and Enjoyments.

CHAPTER VI.
Matrimonial Jars—Extra Leaflet on the Loquacity of Women—More
Pledging—The Mortar and the Snuff-mill—A Scholar’s Kiss—On
the Consolations of Humanity.

Continuation and Conclusion Of Chapter
VI.
The Checked Calico Dress—More Pledges—Christian Neglect of the Study
of Judaism—A Helping Arm (of Leather) stretched forth from the
Clouds—The Auction.

CHAPTER VII.
The Shooting-Match—Rosa’s Autumnal Campaign—Considerations
concerning Curses, Kisses, and the Militia.

CHAPTER VIII.
Scruples as to Payment of Debts—The Rich Pauper’s Sunday Throne-
ceremonial—Artificial Flowers on the Grave—New Thistle
Seedlings of Contention.

First Flower Piece.
The Dead Christ proclaims that there is no God.

Second Flower piece.

A Dream within a Dream.

BOOK III.

CHAPTER IX.
A Potato War with Women—and with Men—A Walk in December—Tinder
for Jealousy—A War of Succession on the subject of a piece of
checked calico—Rupture with Stiefel—Sad Evening Music.

CHAPTER X.
A Lonely New-Year’s Day—The Learned Schalaster—Wooden-leg of
Appeal—Chamber Postal Delivery—The 11th of February, and
Birth-day of the year 1786.

CHAPTER XI.
Leibgeber’s Disquisition on Fame—Firmian’s “Evening Paper”.

CHAPTER XII.
The Flight out of Egypt—The Glories of Travel?—The Unknown Bayreuth
—Baptism in a Storm—Nathalie and the Hermitage—The most
important Conversation in all this Book—An Evening of Friendship.

CHAPTER XIII.
A Clock of Human Beings—A Cold Shoulder—The Venner.

CHAPTER XIV.
A Lover’s Dismissal—Fantaisie—The Child with the Bouquet—The Eden
of the Night, and the Angel at the Gate of Paradise.

First Fruit Piece.
Letter of Dr. Victor to Cato the Elder, on the Conversion of I into Thou, He,
She, Ye, and They; or the Feast of Kindness of the 20th March.
Postscript by Jean Paul.

BOOK IV.

CHAPTER XV.
Rosa von Meyern—Tone-Echoes and After-Breezes from the loveliest of all
Nights—Letters of Nathalie and Firmian—Table-talk by Leibgeber.

CHAPTER XVI.
The Homeward Journey, with all its Pleasures—The Arrival at Home.

CHAPTER XVII.
The Butterfly Rosa in the Form of Mining Caterpillar—Thorn-crowns, and
Thistle-heads of Jealousy.

CHAPTER XVIII.

After-Summer of Marriage—Preparations for Death.

CHAPTER XIX.
The Apparition—Homecoming of the Storms in August, or the last Quarrel
—The Raiment of the Children of Israel.

CHAPTER XX.
Apoplexy—The President of the Board of Health—The Notary-Public—
The last Will and Testament—The Knight’s Move—Revel, the
Morning Preacher—The Second Apoplectic Attack.

CHAPTER XXI.
Dr. Œlhafen and Medical Boot and Shoemaking—The Burial Society—A
Death’s Head in the Saddle—Frederick II. and his Funeral Oration.

CHAPTER XXII.
Journey through Fantaisie—Re-union on the Bindlocher Mountain—
Berneck—Man-doubling—Gefrees—Exchange of Clothes—
Münchberg—Solo-whistling—Hof—The Stone of Gladness and
Double-parting.

CHAPTER XXIII.
Days in Vaduz—Nathalie’s Letter—A New Year’s Wish—Wilderness of
Destiny and the Heart.

CHAPTER XXIV.

News from Kuhschnappel—Woman’s Anticlimax—Opening of the Seventh
Seal.

CHAPTER XXV., AND LAST.
The Journey—The Churchyard—The Spectre—The End of the Trouble,
and of the Book.

PREFACE,

WITH WHICH I WAS OBLIGED TO PUT JACOB OEHRMANN,
GENERAL DEALER, TO SLEEP, BECAUSE I WISHED TO
NARRATE THE “DOG POST DAYS”[4] AND THESE PRESENT
“FLOWER-PIECES,” &C., &C., TO HIS DAUGHTER.
On Christmas Eve of 1794, when I came from the publishers of the two
works in question, and from Berlin, to the town of Scheerau, I went straight
from the mail coach to the house of Mr. Jacob Oehrmann (whose law affairs
I had formerly attended to), having with me letters from Vienna which
might be of considerable service to him. A child can see at a glance that at
that time there was no idea of anything connected with such a matter as a
Preface in my head. It was very cold—being the 24th of December—the
street lamps were lighted, and I was frozen as stiff as the fawn which had
been my fellow-passenger (a “blind” one[5]), by the coach. In the shop
itself, which was full of draughts and other kinds of wind, it was impossible
for a preface-maker of any sense, such as myself, to set to work, because
there was a young lady preface-maker—Oehrmann’s daughter and shop-girl
—already at work making oral prefaces to the little books she was selling—
Christmas almanacs of the best of all kinds—duodecimo books, printed on
unsized paper indeed, but full of real fragments of the golden and silver
ages—I mean, the little books of mottoes, all gold and silver leaf, with
which the blessed Christmas gilds its gifts like the autumn, or silvers them
over like the winter. I don’t blame the poor shop-wench that, besieged as
she was by such a crowd of Christmas Eve customers, she hardly had a nod
to throw at me, old acquaintance as I was; and, although I had only that
moment arrived from Berlin, she showed me in to her father at once.
All was in a glow in there, Jacob Oehrmann as well as his counting-
house. He, too, was sitting over a book, not as a preface-maker, however,
but as a registrator and epitomator; he was balancing his ledger. He had
added up his balance-sheet twice over already, but, to his horror, the credit

side was always a Swiss oertlein (that is, 13½ kreuzers, Zürich currency)
more than the debit side. The man’s attention was wholly fixed upon the
driving-wheel of the calculating machine inside his head; he hardly noticed
me, well as he knew me, and though I had Vienna letters. To mercantile
people, who, like the carriers they employ, are at home all the world over,
and to whom the remotest trading powers are daily sending ambassadors
and envoyés, namely, commercial travellers—to them, I say, it makes little
difference whether it be Berlin, Boston, or Byzance, that one happens to
arrive from.
Being well accustomed to this commercial indifference to fellow mortals,
I stood quietly by the fire, and had my thoughts, which shall here be made
the reader’s property.
I cogitated, as I stood at the fire, on the subject of the public in general,
and found that I could divide it, like man himself, into three parts—into the
Buying-public, the Reading-public, and the Art-public, just as speculative
persons have assumed that man consists of Body, Soul, and Spirit. The
Body, or Buying-public, which consists of scholars by trade, professional
teachers, and people engaged in business—that true corpus callosum of the
German empire—buys and uses the very biggest and most corpulent books
(works of body), and deals with them as women do with cookery books, it
opens them and consults them in order to be guided by them. In the eyes of
this class the world contains two kinds of utter idiots, differing from each
other only in the direction taken by their crack-brained fancies, those of the
one going too much downward, those of the other too much upward; in a
word, philosophers and poets. Naudæus, in his ‘Enumeration of the Learned
Men who were supposed to be Necromancers in the Middle Ages,’ has
admirably remarked that this never was the case with jurists or theologians,
but always with philosophers. It is the case to this day with the wise of the
world, only that, the noble idea of “wizard” and “witchmaster,”—whose
spiritus rector and grand master seems to have been the devil himself—
having got degraded to a name applied to great and clever men and
conjurors, the philosopher must be content to put up with the latter
signification of the term. Poets are in a more pitiable case still; the
philosopher is a member of the fourth faculty, has recognised official
positions—can lecture on his own subjects; but the poet is nothing at all,
holds no state appointment—(if he did he would no longer be “born,” he
would be “made” by the Imperial Chancery), and people who can criticise

him and pass their opinions upon him throw it in his teeth without
ceremony that he makes plentiful use of expressions which are current
neither in commerce, nor in synodal edicts, nor in general regulations, nor
in decisions of the high court of justiciary, nor in medical opinions or
histories of diseases—and that he visibly walks on stilts, is turgid and
bombastic, and never copious enough or condensed enough. At the same
time, I at once admit that, in the rank thus assigned to the poet, he is treated
very much as the nightingale was by Linnæus, which (as he was not taking
its song into account) he, no doubt properly, classed among the funny,
jerking water-wagtails.
The second part of the public, the Soul, the Reading-public, is composed
of girls, lads, and idle persons in general. I shall praise it in the sequel; it
reads us all, at any rate, and skips obscure pages, where there’s nothing but
talk and argument, sticking, like a just and upright judge, or historical
inquirer, to matters of pure fact.
The Art-public, the Spirit, I might, perhaps, leave altogether out of
consideration; the few who have a taste, not only for all kinds of taste, and
for the taste of all nations, but for higher, almost cosmopolitan beauties,
such as Herder, Goethe, Lessing, Wieland and one or two more—an author
has little need to trouble himself about their votes, they are in such a
minority, and moreover, they don’t read him. At all events, they don’t
deserve the dedication with which I, at the fireside, came to the conclusion
that I would bribe the great Buying-public, which is, of course, what keeps
the book trade going. I resolved, in fact, regularly to dedicate my
‘Hesperus,’ or the ‘Kuhschnappler Siebenkæs,’ to Jacob Oehrmann; and
through him, as it were, to the Buying-public. To wit, in this way:—
Jacob Oehrmann is not a man to be despised, I can tell you. He served as
porter of the Stock Exchange in Amsterdam for four years, and rang the
Exchange bell from 11.45 till 12 o’clock. Soon after this, by scraping and
pinching, he became a “pretty rich house” (though he kept a very poor one),
and rose to the dignity of seal-keeper of a whole collection of knightly seals
pasted on to noble, escheated, promises to pay. True, like celebrated
authors, he assumed no municipal offices, preferring to do nothing but
write; but the town militia of Scheerau, whose hearts are always in the right
place (that is to say, the safest), and who bravely exhibit themselves to
passing troops as a watchful corps of observation, insisted upon making

him their captain, though he would have been quite content to have been
nothing but their cloth contractor. He is honest enough, particularly in his
dealings with the mercantile world; and, far from burning the laws of the
Church, like Luther, all he burns even of the municipal law is a title or two
of the Seventh Commandment, indeed, he only makes a beginning at
burning them, as the Vienna censorship does with prohibited books; and
even this only in the cases of carriers, debtors, and people of rank. Before a
man of this stamp I can, without any qualms of conscience, burn a little
sweet-smelling incense, and make his Dutch face appear magnified, to
some extent, like a spectre’s through magic vapour.
Now I thought I should portray, in his likeness, some of the more striking
features of the great Buying-public; for he is a sort of portable miniature of
it—like itself, he cares only for bread-studies, and beer-studies, for no talk
but table-talk, no literature but politics—he knows that the magnet was only
created to hold up his shop-door key if he chooses to stick it on to it—the
tourmaline only to collect his tobacco ashes, his daughter Pauline to take
the place of both (although she attracts stronger things, and with greater
attractive power than either)—he knows no higher thing in the world than
bread, and detests the town painter, who uses it to rub out pencil marks
with. He and his three sons, who are immured in three of the Hanse towns,
read or write no other, and no less important, books than the waste-book
and the ledger.

“May I be d—d,” thought I, as I was warming myself at the stove, “if I
can paint the Buying-public to greater perfection than under the name of
Jacob Oehrmann, who is but a twig, or fibre, of it; but then it couldn’t
possibly know what I meant” it occurred to me; and on account of this error
in my calculations, I have to-day hit upon quite another plan.
Just as I had committed my error the daughter came in, rectified her
father’s, and brought out the balance correctly. Oehrmann looked at me
now, and became to some extent conscious of my existence; and, on my
presenting the Vienna epistles by way of credentials (epistles of this kind
are more to him than poetical, or St. Pauline, epistles)—from being a mere
fresco figure on the wall, as I had been up to that time, I became a

something possessed of a mind and a stomach, and I was asked (together
with the latter) to stay to supper.
Now, although the critics may set all the cliques and circles of Germany
about my ears—aye, and have a new Turkish bell cast specially for the
purpose—I mean to make a clean breast of it here, and state in plain words
that it was solely on account of the daughter that I came, and that I stayed,
there. I knew that the darling would have read all my recent books, if the
old man had given her time to do it; and for that very reason it was
impossible for me to blink the fact that it was incumbent upon me as a
simple duty to talk, if not to sing, her father to sleep, and then tell his
daughter all that I had been telling the world, though the agency of the
press. This, as of course you perceive, was why I usually came there to have
a talk on the evenings of his foreign mail days, when it didn’t take much to
put him to sleep.
On the Christmas Eve, then, what I had to do was to condense and
abridge my “45 Dog Post Days” into the space of about the same number of
minutes; a longish business, rendering a sleep of no brief duration
necessary.
I wish Messrs. the Editors and Reviewers, who find much to blame in
this proceeding of mine, could have just sat down, for once in their lives, on
the sofa beside my namesake Johanna Paulina; they would have
related to her most of my biographical histories in those cleverly epitomised
forms in which they communicate them in their magazines and papers to
audiences of a very different type. They would have been beside themselves
with rapture at the truth and felicity of her remarks, at the natural,
unaffected, simplicity and sincerity of her manner, at the innocence of her
heart, and at her lively sense of humour, and they would have taken hold of
her hand, and cried “let the author treat us to comedies half as delicious as
this one which is sitting beside us now, and he is the man for us.” Indeed,
had these gentlemen, the editors and reviewers, got to know a little more
than they do about the art of briefly extracting the pith and marrow of a
book, and had they been able to move Pauline just a little more than I think
such great critical functionaries could be expected to do; and had they then
seen, or more properly, nearly lost sight of, that gentle face of hers as it
melted away in a dew of tears (because girls and gold are the softer and the
more impressionable the purer they are), and had they, as of course they

would have done, in the heavenliness of their emotion, well-nigh clean
forgotten themselves, and the snoring father——

Good gracious! I have got into a tremendous state over it myself, and
shall keep the preface till to-morrow. It is clear that it must be gone on with
in a calmer mood.

I thought I might take it for granted that the master of the house would
have tired himself so much with letter-writing on the Christmas Eve, that all
that would be wanted to put him to sleep would be some person who should
hasten the process by talking in a long-winded and tedious style. I
considered myself to be that person. However, at first, while supper was
going on, I only introduced subjects which he would understand. While he
was plying his spoon and fork, and till grace had been said, a sleep of any
duration was more than could be expected of him. Wherefore I entertained
him with matter of interest and amusement, such as my blind fellow-
passenger (the fawn), one or two stoppages of payment—my opinions on
the French War, and the high prices of everything—that Frederick Street,
Berlin, was half a mile in length—that there was great freedom, both of the
press and of trade, in that city. I also mentioned that in most parts of
Germany which I had visited, I had found that the beggar boys were the
“revising barristers” of and “lodgers of appeals” against the newspaper
writers; that is to say, that the newspaper makers bring to life, with their ink,
the people who are killed in battle, and are able to avail themselves of these
resurrected ones in the next “affaire;” whilst the soldiers’ children, on the
other hand, like to kill their fathers and then beg upon the lists of killed:
they shoot their fathers dead for a halfpenny each, and the newspaper
evangelists bring them to life again for a penny. And thus these two classes
of the community are, in a beautiful manner, by reciprocity of lying, the one
the antidote to the other. This is the reason why neither a newspaper writer,
nor an orthographer, can strictly adhere to Klopstock’s orthographical rule,
only to write what you hear.

When the cloth was off, I saw that it was time for me to set my foot to
work at the rocking of Captain Oehrmann’s cradle. My ‘Hesperus’ is too big
a book. On other occasions I should have had time enough. On these
occasions all I had to do to get the great Dutch tulip to close its petals in
sleep was, to begin with wars and rumours of wars—then introduce the Law
of Nature, or rather the Laws of Nature, seeing that every fair and every war
provides a fresh supply—from this point I had but a short step to arrive at
the most sublime axioms of moral science, thus dipping the merchant
before he knew where he was into the deepest centre of the health-giving
mineral well of truth. Or I lighted up sundry new systems (of my own
invention), held them under his nose, attacked and refuted them, benumbing
and narcotising him with the smoke till he fell down senseless. Then came
freedom! Then his daughter and I would open the window to the stars and
the flowers outside, while I placed before the poor famished soul a rich
supply of the loveliest poetical honey-bearing blossoms. Such had been my
process on previous occasions. But this evening I took a shorter path. As
soon as grace was said, I got as near as I could to complete unintelligibility,
and proposed to the house of business of Oehrmann’s soul (his body) the
following query: whether there were not more Kartesians than Newtonists
among the princes of Germany. “I do not mean as regards the animal
world,” I continued slowly and tediously. “Kartesius, as we know, is of
opinion that the animals are insentient machines, and consequently, man,
the noblest of animals, would be improperly comprehended in this dictum;
what my meaning is, and what I want to know, is this—do not the majority
(of the princes of Germany) consider that the essentiality of a realm consists
in Extension, as Kartesius holds that of matter to do, only the minority
of them holding, as Newton (a greater man) does of matter, that its
essentiality consists in Solidity.”
He terrified me by answering with the greatest liveliness, and as broad
awake as you please, “There are only two of them that can pay their way—
the Prince of Flachsenfingen and the Prince of——”
At this point his daughter placed a basket of clothes come from the wash
upon the table, and a little box of letters upon the basket, and set to work
printing her brothers’ names at full length upon their shirts. As she took out
of the basket a tall white festival tiara for her father, and took away from
him the base Saturday cowl which he had on, I was incited to become as

obscure and as long-winded as the night-cap and my own designs called
upon me to be.
Now, as there is nothing about which he is so utterly indifferent as my
books, and polite literature in all its branches, I determined to settle him,
once for all, with this detested stuff. I succeeded in pumping out what
follows.
“I almost fear, Captain, that you must have rather wondered that I have
never enabled you to make acquaintance in anything like a very detailed or
explicit manner with my two latest opuscula, or little works; the elder of the
two is, curiously enough, called ‘Dog Post Days,’ and the later ‘Flower-
pieces.’ Perhaps, if I just give you a slight idea to-night of the principal
points of my forty-five Dog Post Days, and then fetch up with the Flower-
pieces this day week, I shall be doing a little towards making amends for
my negligence. Of course, it’s my fault alone, and nobody else’s, if you find
you don’t quite know what the first of the two may be about—whether you
are to suppose it to be a work on heraldry or on insects—or a dictionary of
some particular dialect—or an ancient codex—or a Lexicon Homericum—
or a collection of inaugural disputations—or a ready reckoner—or an epic
poem—or a volume of funeral sermons. It really is nothing but an
interesting story, with threads of all the above subjects woven into it,
however. I should be very glad myself, Captain, if it were better than it is;
and particularly I wish it were written with that degree of lucidity that one
could half read it, and half compose it even, in his sleep. I do not know,
Captain, quite what your canons of criticism may be, and hence I cannot say
whether your taste is British or Greek. I must admit that I shrewdly suspect
that it is not much in the book’s favour that there are parts of it to be found
—I hope not very many—in which there are more meanings than one, of all
kinds of metaphors and flowery styles hashed up together, or an outside
semblance of gravity with no reality behind it, but only mere fun (you see
Germans insist upon a businesslike style), and (which I am most of all
afraid is the case), though the book is of some considerable extent, my
attempts at imitating the romances of chivalry so popular in the present day
(which so often seem as if they really must have been written by the old
artless knights themselves, fellows who were better at wielding the heavy
two-handed sword than the light goose quill)—that my attempts, I say, at
imitating these romances have scarcely been attended with that amount of
success at which I have aimed at attaining. Perhaps, too, I might oftener

have offended the modesty and the ears of the ladies, as many men of the
world have thought I might; for, indeed, books which do not offend the ears
of the great—but only those of the chaste—are not considered the most
objectionable.”
I saw here, when too late, that I had struck on a subject which enlivened
him up prodigiously. I did, indeed, instantly make a jump to a quite
different topic, saying, “it is probably the safest way of all, to have
improper books deposited in public libraries, where the librarians are of the
usual type, because the rudeness of their manners and their disagreeable
behaviour, does more to prevent these books from being read than an edict
of the censorship.” But Jacobus would speak out his thought, “Pauline,
don’t let me forget that the woman Stenzin hasn’t paid her fine yet.”
It was uncommonly annoying that, just when I got sleep lured on to
within a step or two of him, the Captain should all of a sudden draw his
trigger and let off a thing calculated to blow all my sleeping powder to the
four winds of heaven. There is nobody more difficult to weary than a person
who wearies everybody else. I would rather undertake to weary out a lady
who happens to have nothing to do in five minutes’ time, than a man of
business in as many hours.
Pauline, the darling, anxious to hear the stories which I had accompanied
in manuscript to Berlin, put slowly into my hand one by one the following
letters from her letterbox: “STORY”—i. e. she wanted to be told the “Dog
Post Days” that evening.
So I set to work again, and, with a sigh, began in this way: “The fact is,
Mr. Oehrmann, that your humble servant here will soon be setting letters of
this sort flying about in Berlin, by his new book, and my ‘Post Days’ may
be printed on shirts quite as fine as those your sons’ names are being printed
upon, if the people happen to have made their paper from such. But, indeed,
I must admit to you that as I was sitting on the coach on my way to Berlin,
with my right foot under my manuscripts, and my left beneath a bale of
petitions on their way to the Prince of Scheerau, with the army, the only
thing I had in the way of a comforting thought was this very natural one,
‘Devil make a better of it all!’ Only he’s just the very last person to do it.
For, good heavens! in an age like this present age of ours, when the
instruments of universal world history are only being tuned in the orchestra
before the concert begins, that is to say, are all grumbling and squeaking

together in confusion (which was why on one occasion the tuning of the
orchestra pleased a Morocco Ambassador at Vienna much better than the
opera itself)—in such an age, when it is so hard to tell the coward from the
brave man—him who lets everything go as it pleases from him who strives
to do something great and good—those who are withering up from those
who are flourishing and promising fruit, just as in winter the fruit-bearing
trees look much the same as the dead ones—in such an age, there is only
one consolation for an author, one which I have not yet spoken of to-night,
and it is this: that, after all, though it be an age in which the nobler kinds of
virtue, love, and freedom, are the rarest of Phœnixes and birds of the sun,
he can manage to put up with it, and can go on drawing vivid pictures and
writing lively descriptions of all the birds in question, until they wing their
way to us in the body. Doubtless, when the originals of the pictures have
fairly come and taken up their abode here on earth, then will all our
panegyrics of them be out of place, and loathsome to the palate, and a mere
threshing of empty straw. People who are incapable of business can work
for the press.”
“There’s work, and there’s work,” the merchant, wide awake, struck in;
“it all depends—Now TRADE keeps a man; but book-writing isn’t much
better than spinning cotton, and spinning is next door to begging—not
meaning anything personal to yourself. But all the broken-down book-
keepers and bankrupt tradesmen take to the making of books—arithmetic
books, and so on.”
The public sees what a poor opinion this shopkeeper-captain had of me,
because my business was only the making of books, though in old days I
had been continually running in to him day and night, as notary depute, for
the protesting of bills. I know the sort of view many people take of the
convenances of society; but I think anyone on earth will consider that, after
being treated in this style, I was to be excused for going quite wild on the
spot, and responding to the fellow’s impertinence, although he was no
longer quite in his five senses, in no less formidable a manner than by
repeating, accurately and without abridgment, my “extra leaflets” from my
‘Hesperus.’
This, of course, was bound to put him to death—sleep, I mean.
And then thousands of propitious stars arose for the daughter and the
author—then commenced our feast of unleavened bread—then I could sit

down with her at the front window, and tell her all that which the public has
for some time had in its hands. Truly there can be nothing sweeter than to
some kind tender heart, hemmed in on all sides and besieged by sermons—
which cannot refresh itself at so much as a birthday ball, were it only the
superintendent’s and his wife’s, nor with a novel, though its author be the
family legal adviser: to such a beleaguered famishing heart, I say, it is more
delicious than virgin honey to march up with a strong army of relief, and,
taking hold of some mesh in the nun’s veil which is over the soul, tear it
wider, let her peep through and look out at the glimmer of some flowery
eastern land—to wile the tears of her dreams to her waking eyes—to lift her
beyond her own longings, and at a stroke set free the fond tender heart, long
heavy with yearning, and bound in bitter slavery—to set it free, and to rock
it softly up and down in the fresh spring breeze of poesy, while the dewy
warmth gives birth to flowers therein of fairer growth than those of the
country round.
I had just finished by one o’clock. I had taken only three hours to the
three volumes of my story, because I had torn out all the “extra leaves.” “If
the father is the Buying-public, the daughter is the Reading-public, and we
must not plague her with anything that’s not purely historical,” I said, and
sacrificed my most precious digressions, for which, moreover, such an
enchanting neighbourhood is not quite the proper soil.
Then the old man coughed, got up from his chair, asked what o’clock it
was, wished me good night, and opening the door saw me out (thereby
depriving me of a good one), and saw me no more till that night week, on
New Year’s Eve.
My readers will remember that I had promised to come on that evening,
because I had to make a brief report to my client concerning my “Flower-
pieces”—this very book.
I assure the gentle reader that I shall report the events of the evening
exactly as they occurred.
I appeared again, then, on the last evening of the year 1794, on the red
waves of which so many bodies, bled to death, were borne away to the
Ocean of Eternity. My client received me with a coldness which I attributed
partly to that of the temperature outside (for both men and wolves are most
ferocious in hard frost), partly to the Vienna letters which I had—NOT with
me; and on the whole, I had but little to say to the fellow on this occasion.

As, besides, I was going to leave Scheerau on the New Year’s Day by the
Thursday coach, and was very anxious to lay before my dear Pauline some
more Paulina, namely these sketches, because I knew that whatever other
wares she might find upon her counter, these wouldn’t be among them—I
consider that no editor who has any principles whatever can possibly get
into a passion at my having duly appeared. Let any hot-headed person of
the sort just listen to the plan I had. I wanted first to give to this silent soul-
flower the Flower-pieces, two dreams made of flowers put together
mosaic-fashion—next the Thorn-pieces,[6] from which I had to break away
the thorns, that is, the satires, so that nothing remained but a mere curious
story and lastly, the Fruit-piece was to be served up last, as it is in the book
itself, by way of dessert; and in this ripe fruit (from which I had previously
orally expressed all the chilling ice-apple juice of philosophy, which the
press has, however, left in) I meant to appear at the end of the day, myself
as Appleworm. This would have led by easy steps to my departure or
farewell; for I did not know whether I should ever again see or hear of
Pauline, this flower-polypus, stretching out eyeless, palpitating, tentacula,
from mere INSTINCT towards the LIGHT. With the old decayed wood on
which the polyp was blooming I, of course, having no Vienna letters, had
little to do.
But near as it was to the time for wishing new year’s wishes, the old year
was doomed to end with wishes unfulfilled.
Yet I have little to blame myself about; for, as soon as ever I came in, I
did my best to tire out the live East India House and put him to sleep, and I
continued to do so while he sat there. The only agreeable remarks I made to
him were, that when he had said some insulting things about my successor,
his present legal adviser, I extended them so as to apply them to the legal
profession in general, thus elevating the mere pasquinade into the nobler
satire: “I always picture lawyers and clients as two strings of people with
buckets or purses near a kind of engine for quenching money thirst—the
one row, the clients, always passing away with their buckets, or purses,
empty, and the other row standing and handing each other buckets or purses
full,” said I.
I think it was not otherwise than on purpose, that I painted to him the
great Buying-public with lineaments much like his own—for he is a small
Buying-public, only a few feet long and broad. In fact, I made on him an

experiment to ascertain what the Buying-public itself would say to the
following ideas.
“The public of the present day, Captain, is gradually getting to be a
flourishing North India Company, and, it seems to me, it will soon rival the
Dutch, amongst whom butter and books are articles of export trade only; the
attic salt they have a taste for, is that which Benkelszoon used for
pickling fish with. Though they have provided Erasmus, in consideration of
his salt (of a better quality), with a statue (he never ate salt, by the way), yet
I think this was excusable in them, when we remember that they first had
one erected to the fish-curer in question. Even Campe, who by no means
classes the inventors of the spinning-wheel and of Brunswick beer beneath
the constructors and brewers of epic poems, will coincide with me when I
say that the German is really being made something of at the present day;
that he is positively becoming a serious, solid, well-grounded fellow—a
tradesman, a man of business; a man getting past his youthful follies, who
knows edible from cogitable matter (when he sees it), and can winnow out
the latter from the former; who can distinguish the printer from the
publisher, and the bookseller (as the more important) from both; he is
becoming a speculative individual who, like the hens who run from a harp
string with fox-gut, can’t bear the noise of any poet’s harp whatever, were it
strung with the harper’s own heart-strings—and who will soon come to
suffer no pictorial art to exist, except upon bales of merchandise,[7] nor any
printing except calico-printing.”
Here I saw, to my amazement, that the merchant was asleep already, and
had shut the window-shutters of his senses. I was a good deal annoyed that I
had been standing in awe of him, as well as talking to him, all this time
unnecessarily; I had been playing the part of the Devil, and he that of King
Solomon, supposed by the evil one to be alive when he was dead.[8]
Meantime, with the view of not waking him up by means of a sudden
change of key, I went on talking to him as if nothing had happened,
speaking to him all the time I was slipping away from him further and
further towards the window with an exceedingly gradual diminuendo of my
tone, as follows:—“And of such a public as this, I quite expect that a time
will come when it will value shoe leather much above altar-pieces,[9] and
that, when the moral and philosophical credit of any philosopher chances to

be in question, its first inquiry of all will be, ‘is the fellow solvent?’ And
further, my beloved listener (I continued in the same tone, so as not to run
the risk of waking the sleeper by any change in the kind of sound), it is to
be hoped and expected that I shall now have an opportunity of going
through, for your entertainment, my Flower-pieces, which have not even
been committed to paper as yet, and which I can quite easily finish this
evening, if he (father Jacobus) will have the goodness to sleep long
enough.”
I commenced, accordingly, as follows:—
P.S. But it would be too utterly ridiculous altogether, if I were to have the
whole of the Flower and Thorn pieces, which are all in the book itself,
printed over again in the preface! At the end of book the first, however, I
shall give the continuation and conclusion of this preface, and of the New
Year’s Eve, and shall then go on with the second book, so that it may be
ready for the Easter fair.

Jean Paul Fr. Richter.
Hof, 7th November, 1796.

WEDDED LIFE, DEATH AND MARRIAGE

OF

F. S. SIEBENKÆS,

Parish Advocate in the royal burgh of
Kuhschnappel.

A GENUINE THORN PIECE.

BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.

A WEDDING DAY, SUCCEEDING A DAY OF RESPITE—THE
COUNTERPARTS—DISH QUINTETTE IN TWO COURSES—TABLE-
TALK—SIX ARMS AND HANDS.

Siebenkæs, parish advocate[10] for the royal borough of Kuhschnappel,
had spent the whole of Monday at his attic-window watching for his wife
that was to be, who had been expected to arrive from Augspurg a little
before service-time, so as to get a sip of something warm before going to
church for the wedding.
The Schulrath of the place, happening to be returning from Augspurg,
had promised to bring the bride with him as return cargo, strapping her
wedding outfit on to his trunk behind.
She was an Augspurger by birth—only daughter of the deceased
Engelkraut, clerk of the Lutheran Council—and she lived in the Fuggery, in
a roomy mansion which was probably bigger than many drawing-rooms
are. She was by no means portionless, for she lived by her own work, not
on other people’s, as penisoned court-ladies’-maids do. She had all the
newest fashions in bonnets and other headgear in her hands earlier than the
richest ladies of the neighbourhood, albeit in such miniature editions that
not even a duck could have got them on; and she erected edifices for the
female head at a few days’ notice, on a large scale, after these miniature
sketches and small-scale plans of them.
All that Siebenkæs did during his long wait was to depose on oath (more
than once) that it was the devil who invented seeking, and his grandmother
who devised waiting. At length, while it was still pretty early, came, not the
bride, but a night post from Augspurg, with an epistle from the Schulrath to
say that he and the lady “could not possibly arrive before Tuesday. She was
still busy at her wedding-clothes, and he in the libraries of the ex-Jesuits,
and of Privy Councillor Zopf, and (among the antiquities) at the city gates.”

Siebenkæs’s butterfly-proboscis, however, found plenty of open honey
cells in every blue thistle blossom of his fate; he could now, on this idle
Monday, make a final application of the arm file and agate burnisher to his
room, brush out the dust and the writing-sand with the feather of a quill
from his table, rout out the accumulations of bits of paper and other rubbish
from behind the mirror, wash, with unspeakable labour, the white porcelain
inkstand into a more dazzling whiteness, and bring the butter-boat and the
coffee-pot into a more advanced and prominent position (drawing them up
in rank and file on the cupboard), and polish the brass nails on the
grandfather’s leather arm-chair till they shone again. This new temple-
purification of his chamber he undertook merely by way of something to
do; for a scholar considers the mere arranging of his books and papers to be
a purification as of the temple, at least so maintained the parish advocate,
saying further, “orderliness is, properly defined, nothing but a happy knack
which people acquire of putting a thing for twenty years in the old place, let
that place be where it will.”
Not only was he tenant of a pleasant room, but also of a long red dining-
table, which he had hired and placed beside a commoner one; also of some
high-backed arm-chairs: moreover the landlords or proprietors of the
furniture and of the lodgings (who all lived in the house) had all been
invited by him to dinner on this his play Monday, which was an excellent
arrangement, inasmuch as—most of the people of the house being working-
men—their play Monday and his fell together; for it was only the landlord
who was anything superior, and he was a wig-maker.
I should have had cause to feel ashamed of myself had I gone and used
my precious historical colours in portraying a mere advocate of the poor (a
fit candidate for his own services in that capacity). But I have had access to
the documents and accounts relating to my hero’s guardianship during his
minority, and from these I can prove, at any hour, in a court of justice, that
he was a man worth at least 1200 Rhenish guldens (i.e. 100l.), to say
nothing of the interest. Only, unfortunately, the study of the ancients, added
to his own natural turn of mind, had endowed him with an invincible
contempt for money, that metallic mainspring of the machinery of our
human existence, that dial plate on which our value is read off, although
people of sense, tradespeople for example, have quite as high an opinion of
the man who acquires, as of him who gets rid of it; just as a person who is
electrified gets a shining glory round his head whether the fluid be passing

into or out of him. Indeed, Siebenkæs even said (and on one occasion he did
it) that we ought sometimes to put on the beggar’s scrip in jest, simply to
accustom the back to it against more serious times. And he considered that
he justified (as well as complimented) himself in going on to say, “It is
easier to bear poverty like Epictetus than to choose it like Antoninus; in the
same way that it is easier for a slave to stick out his own leg to be cut off,
than for a man who wields a sceptre a yard long to leave the legs of his
slaves alone.” Wherefore he made shift to live for ten years in foreign parts,
and for half a year in the imperial burgh, without asking his guardian for a
single halfpenny of the interest of his capital. But as it was his idea to
introduce his orphan, moneyless bride as mistress and overseer into a silver
mine all ready opened and timbered for her reception (for such he
considered his 100l. with the accumulated interest to be), it had pleased him
to give her to understand, while he was in Augspurg, that he had nothing but
his bare bread, and that what little he could scrape together by the sweat of
his brow, went from hand to mouth, though he worked as hard as any man,
and cared little about the Upper House of Parliament or the Lower. “I’ll be
handed,” he had long ago said, “if I ever marry a woman who knows how
much I have a year. As it is, women often look upon a husband as a species
of demon, to whom they sign away their souls—often their child—that the
evil one may give them money and eatables.”
This longest of summer days and Mondays was followed by the longest
of winter nights (which is impossible only in an astronomical sense). Early
next morning, the Schulrath Stiefel drove up, and lifted out of the carriage
(fine manners have twice their charm when they adorn a scholar) a bonnet-
block instead of the bride, and ordered the rest of her belongings, which
consisted of a white tinned box, to be unloaded, while he, with her head
under his arm, ran upstairs to the advocate.
“Your worthy intended,” he said, “is coming directly. She is getting ready
at this moment, in a farm cottage, for the sacred rite, and begged me to
come on before, lest you should be impatient. A true woman, in Solomon’s
sense of the term, and I congratulate you most heartily.”
“The Heir Advocate Siebenkæs, my pretty lady?—I can conduct you to
him myself. He lodges with me, and I will wait upon you this moment,”
said the wig-maker, down at the door, and offered his hand to lead her up:
but, as she caught sight of her second bonnet-block, still sitting in the

carriage, she took it on her left arm as if it had been a baby (the hairdresser
in vain attempting to get hold of it), and followed him with a hesitating step
into the advocate’s room. She held out her right hand only, with a deep
curtsey and gentle greeting, to her bridegroom, and on her full round face
(everything in it was round, brow, eyes, mouth, and chin) the roses far out-
bloomed the lilies, and were all the prettier to look upon as seen below the
large black silk bonnet; while the snow-white muslin dress, the many-tinted
nosegay of artificial flowers, and the white points of her shoes, added
charm upon charm to her timid figure. She at once untied her bonnet—there
being barely time to get one’s hair done and be married—and laid her
garland, which she had hidden at the farm that the people might not see it,
down upon the table, that her head might be properly put to rights, and
powdered for the ceremony (as a person’s of quality ought to be) by the
landlord, thus conveniently at hand.
Thou dear Lenette! A bride is, it is true, during many days, for everyone
whom she’s not going to many, a poor meagre piece of shewbread—and
especially is she so to me. But I except one hour, namely, that on the
morning of the wedding-day, when the girl, whose life has been all freedom
hitherto, trembling in her wedding dress, overgrown (like an ivied tree) with
flowers and feathers, which, with others like them, fate is soon to pluck
away—and with anxious pious eyes overflowing on her mother’s heart for
the last and loveliest time; this hour, I say, moves me, in which, standing all
adorned on the scaffold of joy, she celebrates so many partings, and one
single meeting: when the mother turns away from her and goes back to her
other children, leaving her, all fainthearted, to a stranger. “Thou heart,
beating high with happiness,” I think then, “not always wilt thou throb thus
throughout the sultry years of wedded life; often wilt thou pour out thine
own blood, the better to pass along the path to age, as the chamois hunter
keeps his foot from sliding by the blood from his own heel.” And then I
would fain go out to the gazing, envious virgins by the wayside leading to
the church, and say to them, “Do not so begrudge the poor girl the
happiness of a, perhaps fleeting, illusion. Ah, what you and she are looking
at to-day is the strife- and beauty-apple of marriage hanging only on the
sunny side of love, all red and soft; no one sees the green sour side of the
apple hidden in the shade. And if ye have ever been grieved to the soul for
some luckless wife who has chanced, ten years after her wedding, to come
upon her old bridal dress, in a drawer, while tears for all the sweet illusions

she has lost in these ten years rise in a moment to her eyes, are you so sure
it will be otherwise with this envied one who passes before you all joy and
brightness now?”
I should not, however, have performed this unexpected modulation into
the “remote key” of tenderheartedness, had it not been that I managed to
form to myself a picture so irresistibly vivid of Lenette’s myrtle wreath,
beneath her hat (I really had not the slightest intention to touch on the
subject of my own personal feelings), and her being all alone without a
mother, and her powdery white-flower face, and (more vivid still) of the
ready willingness with which she put her young delicate arms (she was
scarcely past nineteen) into the polished handcuffs and chain-rings of
matrimony, without so much as looking round her to see which way she
was going to be led by them——
I could here hold up my hand and take oath that the bridegroom was
quite as much moved as myself, if not more so; at all events, when he
gently wiped the Auricula dust from the blossom-face, so that the flowers
there were seen to bloom unobscured. But he had to be careful how he
carried about that heart of his—so full to the brim of the potion of love, and
tears of gladness—lest it should run over in the presence of the jovial
hairdresser and the serious Schulrath, to his shame. Effusion was a thing he
never permitted himself. All strong feeling, even of the purest, he hid away,
and hardened over: he always thought of poets and actors, who let on the
waterworks of their emotions to play for show; and there was no one, on the
whole, at whom he bantered so much as at himself. For these reasons, his
face to-day was drawn and crinkled by a queer, laughing, embarrassment,
and only his eyes, where the moisture gleamed, told of the better side of this
condition. As he noticed presently that he wasn’t masking himself
sufficiently by merely playing the part of barber’s mate, and commissary of
provisions (of the breakfast), he adopted stronger measures, and began to
exhibit himself and his movable property in as favourable a light as possible
to Lenette, inquiring of her whether she didn’t think her room “nicely
situated,” and saying, “I can see into the senate house window, on to the
great table, and all the ink bottles. Several of these chairs I got last spring at
a third of their value, and very handsome they are, don’t you think so? My
good old grandfather’s chair here, though” (he had sat down in it, and laid
his lean arms on the chair’s stuffed ones), “does, I think, take the
precedence in the grandfather dance:[11] ‘how they so softly rest,’ arm upon

arm! The flowers upon my table-cloth are rather cleverly done, but the
coffee-tray is considered the better work of the two, I am given to
understand, on account of its flora being japanned; however, they both do
their best in the flower line. My Leyser with his pigskin ‘Meditations’ is a
great ornament to the room: the kitchen, though, is the place—better still
than this room; there are pots, all ranged side by side—and all sorts of
things—the hare-skinner and the hare-spit—my father used to shoot the
hares for these.”
The bride smiled on him so contentedly that I must almost believe she
had heard the greater part of the story of the 100l. (with interest) in her
Fuggery through twenty united ear- and speaking-trumpets. I shall be the
more inclined to believe this if the public should happen to be looking
forward eagerly to the hour when he is to hand it over to her.
It may not be otherwise than agreeable to my fair readers to be informed
that the bridegroom now put on a liver-coloured dress coat, and that he
walked to the church with his dress-maker without any dress cravat, and
with no queue in his hair, picturing as he went, to his own satirical delight,
the slanderous glances with which the fair Kuhschnappelers were following
the good stranger girl across the market to the sacrificial altar of her maiden
name. He had said on a previous occasion, “We ought rather to facilitate
than obstruct backbiting, to a moderate extent, in a married woman, as some
slight compensation for lost flatteries.”
The Schulrath Stiefel remained in the bridal chamber, where he sketched
the outlines of a critique on a school-programme at the writing-table.
I see before me, as I write, the lovers kneeling at the altar steps; and I
should like to cast wishes at them (as flowers are thrown), especially a wish
that they may be like the married in Heaven, who, according to
Swedenborg’s vision, always merge into one angel—although on earth, too,
they are often fused, by warmth, into one angel, and that a fallen one—the
husband (who is the head of the wife) representing the butting head of this
evil one; this wish, I say, I would fain cast at them; but my attention, in
common with that of all the wedding company is riveted by an
extraordinary circumstance and puzzling apparition behind the music desks
of the choir.
For there appears there, looking down at us—and we all looking up at it
—Siebenkæs’s spirit, as the popular expression has it, i.e. his body, as it

ought to be called. If the bridegroom should look up he might turn pale, and
think he saw himself. We are all wrong; he only turns red. It was his friend
Leibgeber who was standing there, having many years ago vowed to travel
any distance to his marriage, solely that he might laugh at him for twelve
hours’ time.
There has seldom been a case of a royal alliance between two peculiar
natures like that between these two. The same contempt for the childish
nonsense held in this life to be noble matter, the same enmity to all pettiness
and perfect indulgence to the little, the same indignation with dishonourable
selfishness, the same delight in laughing in this lovely madhouse of an
earth, the same deafness to the voice of the multitude, but not to that of
honour; these are but some of the first at hand of the similarities which
made of these two but one soul doing duty in two bodies. And the fact that
they were also foster-brothers in their studies, having for nurses the same
branches of knowledge, including the Law herself, I do not reckon among
their chief resemblances; for it is often the case that the very identity of
study becomes a dissolving decomponent of friendship. Indeed, it was not
even the dissimilarity of their opposite poles which determined their mutual
attraction for each other (Siebenkæs leant towards forgiving, Leibgeber
towards punishing; the former was more a satire of Horace, the latter a
street ballad of Aristophanes with unpoetic as well as poetic harshnesses).
But, as two female friends are fond of being dressed alike, these two men’s
souls had put on just the same frock-coat and morning costume of life; I
mean, two bodies of identical fashion, colour, button-holes, finishings, and
cut. Both had the same flash of the eyes, the same earthy coloured face, the
same tallness, leanness, and everything. And indeed, the Nature freak of
counterpart faces is commoner than we suppose, because we only notice it
when some prince or great person casts a corporeal reflection.
For which reason I very much wish that Leibgeber had not had a slight
limp, so that he might not have been thereby distinguishable from
Siebenkæs, seeing, at least, that the latter had cleverly etched and dissolved
away his own peculiar mark by causing a live toad to breathe its last above
it. For there had been a pyramidal mole near his left ear, in the shape of a
triangle, or of the zodiacal light, or a turned-up comet’s tail, of an ass’s ear
in short. Partly from friendship, partly from the enjoyment they had in the
scenes of absurdity which their being confounded with each other gave rise
to in every-day life, they wished to carry the algebraic equation which

existed between them yet a step further, by adopting the same Christian and
surname. But on this point they had a friendly contest, as each wanted to be
the other’s namesake, till at length they settled the difference by exchanging
names, thus following the example of the natives of Otaheite, among whom
the lovers exchange names as well as hearts.
As it is now several years since my hero was thus lightened of his worthy
name by this friendly name-stealer receiving the other worthy name in
exchange, I can’t do anything to alter this in my chapters. I must go on
calling him Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkæs as I did at the beginning, and the
other Leibgeber; although it is quite unnecessary for any reviewer to point
out to me that the more comic name of Siebenkæs would have been better
suited to this more humoristic newcomer, with whom, however, the world
shall yet be better acquainted than I am myself.
When these two counterparts caught sight of one another in the church,
their blushing faces crinkled and curled oddly, at which the looker-on
laughed, until he compared the faces with the eyes, which glowed warm
with the deepest affection. While the wedding-rings were being exchanged,
Leibgeber in the choir took from his pocket a pair of scissors and a quarto
sheet of black paper, and cut out a distant view of the bride’s profile. This
cutting out of likenesses he generally gave out as being his cookshop and
bakery upon his perpetual journeyings; and as it appears that this strange
man does not choose to disclose upon what eminences the waters gather
which well up for him down in the valleys, I am glad to quote (and express
my own belief in) a frequent saying of his regarding his profile cutting—“In
the process of clipping, slices of bread, we know, fall with the cuttings for
the bookbinder, the letter-writer, and the lawyer, when the paper is white;
but in clipping black paper, whether profiles or white mourning letters with
black borders, there fall many more: and if a man is versed in the liberal art
of painting his fellow Christian blacker than he is—with more members
than one—the tongue for instance can do it to some extent—then Fortune,
the Babylonish harlot, will ring that man’s bells (his dinner bell, and his
little altar bell), till her arm is half crippled.”
While the deacon was laying his hands on the pair, Leibgeber came down
and stood at the red velvet steps of the altar. And when the ceremony was
over he made, on the occasion of a meeting such as this, after a separation
of some half-a-year or so, the following somewhat lengthy speech:—

“Good morning, Siebenkæs.”
They never said more to each other, though years might have elapsed;
and at the resurrection of the dead, Siebenkæs will answer him, just as he
did to-day,—
“Good morning, Leibgeber.”
The twelve hours of banter, however, which friends often find it an easy
matter to threaten each other with in absence, are an impossibility to the
tender heart, keenly enough alive though it may be to the humorous sides of
matters, when it is moved (as in this case) at the sight of the friend passing
into the vestibule of some new labyrinth of our subterranean existence.
I have now before my writing-desk the long wedding-table set out; and I
am sorry that no painting of it occurs on any of the vases buried at
Herculaneum, as it would have been dug out with the rest, and an exact
copy of it given in the Herculanean illustrations, so that I could have
inserted the copy in place of anything else. Few have a higher opinion of
the powers of my pen than I have myself; but I see quite well that it is
neither in my power nor in my pen’s to half portray, and that in a feeble
style, how the guests—there were almost as many there as there were chairs
—enjoyed themselves at the dinner; how, moreover, there was not one
single rogue among them (for the bridegroom’s guardian, Heimlicher von
Blaise, had sent an excuse, saying he was very sick indeed); how the
landlord of the house, a jovial, consumptive Saxon, did something towards
expediting his departure from this life by his powdering and his drinking;
how they banged the glasses with the forks, and the table with the
marrowbones, that the former might be filled and the latter emptied; how in
all the house not a soul, not even the shoemaker or the bookbinder, did a
stroke of any other work but eating, and how even the old woman Sabel
(Sabine) who squatted under the mouse-coloured town gate, shut up her
stall on this one day before the closing of the gate; how not only was there
one course served up, but a second, a “Doppelgänger.” To anyone, indeed,
who has dined at great men’s tables, and there remarked how fine dishes, if
there are two courses, have got to be marshalled according to the laws of
rank, it will not appear unheard of or over splendid that Siebenkæs (the
hairdresser’s wife had done the cooking on this occasion) provided for the
first course.

1. In the centre the soup-tub, or broth fishpond, wherein people could
enjoy the sport of crayfish-catching with their spoons, although the
crayfish, like the beavers, had in this water no more than Robespierre had in
the convent—that is to say, merely the tail.
2. In the first quarter of the globe a beautiful beef torso, or cube of meat,
as pedestal of the entire culinary work of art.
3. In the second, a fricassée, being a complete pattern-card of the
butcher’s shop, sweetly treated.
4. In the third, a Behemoth of pond-carps, which might have swallowed
the prophet Jonah, but which underwent his fate itself.
5. In the fourth, a baked hen-house of a pie, to which the birds had sent
their best members, as a community does to parliament.
I cannot deny myself and my fair readers the pleasure of just slightly
sketching for them a little “cookery-piece” of the second course.
1. In the middle stood, as a basket of garden-flowers might, a pile of
cress-salad. 2. Then the four corners were occupied by the four syllogistic
figures, or the four faculties. In the first corner of the table was, as first
syllogistic figure and faculty, a hare, who, as antipode of a barefooted friar,
had kept on his natural fur boots in the pan, and who, as Leibgeber justly
remarked, had come from the field with his legs safe and sound in spite of
the enemy’s fire, more fortunate, in this respect, than many a soldier. The
second syllogistic figure consisted of a calf’s tongue, which was black, not
from arguing, but from being smoked. The third, crisped colewort, but
without the stalks: this, ordinarily the food of the two preceding faculties,
was on this occasion eaten along with them; thus is it that in this world one
goes up and another down. The concluding figure was made up of the three
figures of the bridal pair and an eventual baby baked in butter; these three
glorified bodies, which, like “the three children,” had come forth unscathed
from the fiery furnace, and had raisins for souls, were eaten up bodily, skin
and bones, by those cannibals the guests, with the exception of an arm or so
of the infant, which, like the bird Phœnix, was personified ere it existed.
This picture draws me on. But it ought to be coloured, and as regards the
luxury of the feast, it would not be passing it over too lightly were I to
compare it to a Saxon electoral banquet, by reference to which I might
illustrate it. It is true, the electors of that country require a good deal (and
on that account they used to be weighed every year); and I am quite aware

that at the beginning of the 16th century, a Saxon treasurer made the
following entry in his accounts:—“This day was our gracious sovereign at
the wine, with his court, for which I have had to disburse the sum of fifteen
gulden (25s.). That’s what I call banquetting!” But what would the Saxon
treasurer have written? how he would have lifted his hands up with
amazement if he had read in my very first chapter that a poor’s advocate
had gone and spent three gulden and seven groschen more than his royal
master!
As is the case with many natural springs, the fountains of mirth, which
welled but slowly in the daytime, jetted up higher in the hearts of the guests
as the evening came on. The two advocates indeed told the company that, as
they remembered from their college days, though the privilege formerly
possessed by every German of drinking his fill had been but too much
curtailed by emperors and parliaments, and the imperial decrees of 1512,
1531, 1548, and 1577 permitted no drunkenness, yet they did not prohibit
Kuhschnappel from exercising the right common to all imperial states, of
abrogating imperial statutes in cases where local laws exist within their own
boundaries. The Schulrath alone could not quite see (and he shook his head
about it internally to himself twenty times) how two scholars, two lawyers
at all events, could go on gravely joking with a set of such unlearned
plebeians and empty heads as were here supported upon elbows;—joking
with them, and actually conversing about the utter rubbish which they
talked. More than once he spliced on threads of scholarly speech,
concerning the newest, most highly elaborated school addresses, as well as
sundry critiques on the same, but the advocates would have nothing to do
with his threads, but made the bookbinder speak the apprentice speech he
made at his admission to the rank of master, to which the shoemaker, of his
own motion, stitched and cobbled on one which he had made on a similar
occasion.
Siebenkæs remarked to the company in general that in the upper circles
of society people are much graver, and more tedious, and empty than in the
lower; that in the former, if any party happens to come to an end without
accursed tedium, people talk of it for a whole week, whereas in the latter
everyone contributes so much to the merry picnic of conversation that the
only thing there generally is not enough of, is beer. “Oh!” he went on, “if
everyone of our condition would but think of it, he would but envy those of
a lower; how accurately, in a figurative sense too, does that old truth hold

good, that coarse linen keeps one much warmer than fine linen, or even silk,
just as a wooden house is easier warmed than a stone one—and the stone
one again doesn’t get cool so soon as the wooden in summer—or as coarse
brown flour is much more nourishing than the fine white, as all the doctors
tell us. And I cannot bring myself to believe that ladies in Paris who wear
diamond hairpins, lead half such happy lives as the women there who get
their living by picking up old hairpins out of the street sweepings; and many
a one whose fuel is nothing but dry fir-cones, gathered by himself as a
substitute for fir-fuel” (here the fuel economising company thought vividly
of their own case), “is often quite as well off on the whole as people who
can preserve green cones in sugar and eat them.”
“Friend Parish Advocate,” said Leibgeber, “there you hit it! In the tap-
room and the bar-parlour the worst is at the beginning, the blow, the kick,
the angry word come first of all; the pleasure swells with the reckoning. The
reverse is the case in the palace; in a ‘palais’ for the ‘palais’ everybody’s
enjoyment goes into his mouth at the same instant; just as the little Aphides
on the leaves all lift up their tail-ends, and squirt out the honey at the same
moment,[12] in the palace it is absorbed with like simultaneousness and
sociability. Tediousness, again, annoyance and satiety, are only mixed up
ingeniously among the various pleasures which are served up and
administered in the course of a great entertainment, just as we give a dog an
emetic by rubbing him all over with it, so that he may bring it to operate by
licking it slowly off.”
And other similar sayings were spoken. When once any pleasure has
reached a considerable height, its natural tendency is to become greater.
Many of the lower class members of the sitting exercised the privilege of
drink, and of the special inquisition, to say “Thou” to one another. Even the
gentleman in the red plush coat (the Schulrath was given to wear one in the
dog-day holidays) screwed up his lips, and smiled in a seductive manner, as
elderly maiden ladies do in the presence of elderly single gentlemen, and
gave hints that he had got at home a couple of real Horatian bottles of
champagne. “Not sparkling then, I’m sure?” Leibgeber answered
inquiringly. The Schulrath, who thought the best kind of champagne exactly
the worst, replied with some self-consciousness, “If it isn’t sparkling, well
and good, I swear I’ll drink every drop of it myself.” The bottles appeared.
Leibgeber, taking the first one, carefully filed through its barrier chain,
removed the cork and opened it as if it had been a last will and testament.

What I maintain is, that, even should the two balsam-trees of life, namely
wit and the love of our fellow men, be withered away up to the very
topmost twig, they can still be brought to life by a proper shower out of the
watering pot of these said bottles—in three minutes they will begin to
sprout. As the glad, wild essence, the wine of the silver foam, touched the
heads of the guests, every brain began to seethe and glow while fair air-
castles rose in each amain. Brilliant and many tinted were the floating
bubbles blown and set free by the Schulrath Stiefel’s ideas of all categories,
his simple as well as his compound ideas, his innate ideas, and also his
fixed. And can it ever be forgotten that he ceased to make learned
statements, except on the subject of Lenette’s perfections, and that he told
Leibgeber in confidence, that he should really like to marry, not indeed,
“the tenth Muse, or the fourth Grace, or the second Venus—for it was clear
who had got her already but some step-sister goddess, a distant relation or
other of hers.” During the whole journey, he said, he had preached from the
coachbox, as from a pulpit, enlarging to the bride on the subject of the
blessedness of the married state, painting it to her in the brightest colours,
and drawing such a lively picture of it, that he quite longed to enter into it
himself: and the bridegroom would have thanked him if he had seen how
gratefully she had looked at him in return. And, indeed, the bride was a
great success, and happy in all she did that day, and particularly that
evening; and what became her best of all was that on such a high day as
this, she waited upon others more than she let herself be waited upon—that
she put on a light every-day dress—that even at this advanced stage of her
own education she took private lessons in cookery and household matters
from her female guests, who aired their own theories on these subjects—
and that she already began to think about to-morrow. Stiefel, in his inspired
state, ventured upon exploits which were all but impossible. He placed his
left arm under his right, and thus supporting its weight and that of its plush
sleeve, in a horizontal position, snuffed the candle before the whole
company, and did it rather skilfully on the whole; somewhat like a gardener
on a ladder holding out his pruning shears at arm’s length to a high branch
and snipping off the whole concern by a slight movement of his hand at the
bottom. He asked Leibgeber plump out to give him a profile of Lenette, and
later on, when he was going away, he even made an attempt (but this was
the only one of his ventures which failed) to get hold of her hand and kiss it.

At length all the joy-fires of this happy little company burnt down like
their candles, and one by one the rivers of Eden fell away into the night.
The guests and the candles got fewer and fewer; at last there was only one
guest there, Stiefel (for Leibgeber is not a guest), and one long candle. It is
a lovely and touching time when the loud clamour of a merry company has
finally buzzed itself away into silence, and just one or two, left alone, sit
quietly, often sadly, listening to the faint echoes, as it were, of all the joy.
Finally, the Schulrath struck the last remaining tent of this camp of
enjoyment, and departed; but he would not for a moment suffer that those
fingers, which, in spite of all their efforts, his lips could not touch, should
be clasped about a cold brass candlestick, for the purpose of lighting him
downstairs. So Leibgeber had to do this lighting. The husband and wife, for
the first time, were alone in the darkness, hand in hand.
Oh, hour of beauty! when in every cloud there stood a smiling angel,
dropping flowers instead of rain, may some faint reflection from thee reach
even to this page of mine, and shine on there for ever.
The bridegroom had never yet kissed his bride. He knew, or fancied, that
his face was a clever one, with sharp lines and angles, expressing energetic,
active effort; not a smooth, regular, “handsome” one: and as, moreover, he
always laughed at himself and his own appearance, he supposed it would
strike other persons in the same light. Hence it was that, although as an
every-day matter he rose superior to the eyes and tongues of a whole street
(not even taking the pains mentally to snap his fingers at them), he never,
except in extraordinary moments of dithyrambics of friendship, had
mustered up the courage to kiss his Leibgeber—let alone Lenette. And now
he pressed her hand more closely, and in a dauntless manner turned his face
to hers (for, you see, they were in the dark, and he couldn’t see her); and he
wished the staircase had as many steps as the cathedral tower, so that
Leibgeber might be a long time coming back with the candle. Of a sudden
there danced (so to speak) over his lips a gliding, tremulous kiss, and—then
all the flames of his affection blazed on high, the ashes blown clean away.
For Lenette, innocent as a child, believed it to be the bride’s duty to give
this kiss. He put his arms about the frightened giver with the courage of
bashfulness, and glowed upon her lips with his with all the fire wherewith
love, wine and joy had endowed him; but—so strange is her sex—she
turned away her mouth, and let the burning lips touch her cheek. And there
the modest bridegroom contented himself with one long kiss, giving

expression to his rapture only in tears of unutterable sweetness which fell
like glowing naphtha-drops upon Lenette’s cheeks, and thence into her
trembling heart. She leant her face further away; but in her beautiful wonder
at his love, she drew him closer to her.
He left her before his darling friend came back. The tell-tale powder-
snow which had fallen on the bridegroom—that butterfly-dust which the
very slightest touch of these white butterflies leaves upon our fingers (and
hence it was a good idea of Pitt’s to put a tax on powder in 1795)—told
some of the story, but the eyes of the friend and the bride, gleaming in
happy tears, told him it all. The two friends looked for some time at each
other with embarrassed smiles, and Lenette looked at the ground. Leibgeber
said, “Hem! Hem!” twice over, and at length, in his perplexity, remarked,
“We’ve had a delightful evening!” He took up a position behind the
bridegroom’s chair, to be out of sight, and laid his hand on his shoulder, and
squeezed it right heartily; but the happy Siebenkæs could restrain himself
no longer; he stood up, resigned the bride’s hand, and the two friends, at
last, after the long yearning of the long day, as if celebrating the moment of
their meeting, stood silently embracing, united by angels, with Heaven all
around them. His heart beating higher, the bridegroom would fain have
widened and completed this circle of union, by joining his bride and his
friend in one embrace; but the bride and the friend took each one side of
him, each embracing only him. Then three pure heavens opened in glory in
three pure hearts; and nothing was there but God, love, and happiness, and
the little earthly tear which hangs on all our joy-flowers, here below.
In this their great joy and bliss, overborne by unwonted emotion, and
feeling almost strange to each other, they had scarce the courage to look
into each other’s tearful eyes; and Leibgeber went away in silence, without
a word of parting or good night.

CHAPTER II.

HOME FUN—SUNDRY FORMAL CALLS—THE NEWSPAPER
ARTICLE—A LOVE QUARREL, AND A FEW HARD WORDS—
ANTIPATHETIC INK ON THE WALL—FRIENDSHIP OF THE
SATIRISTS—GOVERNMENT OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.
There is many a life which is as pleasant to live as to write, and the
material of this one, in particular, which I am engaged in writing, is as yet
always giving out, like rosewood on the turning lathe, a truly delicious
perfume, all over my workshop. Siebenkæs duly arose on the Wednesday,
but not till the Sunday was it his intention to deposit in the hands of his
diligent house goddess—who put a cap on to her cap-block in the morning
before she put one on to herself—the silver ingots from his guardian’s
coffer (wrapped in blotting paper), her palisades of refuge in the siege of
this life; for in fact he couldn’t do so any sooner, because his guardian had
gone into the country, that is to say, out of town, till the Saturday night. “I
can give you no notion, old Leibgeber,” said Siebenkæs, “what a joy I feel
in looking forward to how this will delight my wife. I’m sure, to give her
pleasure, I could wish it were three thousand dollars. The dear child has
always hitherto had to live from bonnet to bonnet, but how she will consider
herself a woman set up on a sudden for life, when she finds she can carry
out a hundred housekeeping projects, which, I see as well as possible, she
has got in her head already. And then, old boy, with the money in our hands,
we shall begin the keeping of my silver wedding directly, the moment the
evening service is over—there shall be a good half-florin’s worth of beer in
every room in the house. Look here! why shouldn’t the dove, or call him the
sparrow, of my hymen play out beer on the people as the two-headed eagle
in Frankfort does wine at a coronation?” Leibgeber answered, “The reason
he can’t is, that the prey he catches is of quite another brand. The sour wine
(of the Frankfort eagle) is but the grapeskins—the feathers, the wool, and
the hair which eagles always eject.”

It would be of no use whatever—because hundreds of Kuhschnappelers
would correct my statement in their local paper, the ‘Imperial News’—if I
were to tell a falsehood here (which I should like very much to do), and
assert that the two advocates spent the short week of their being together
with that gravity and propriety which, becoming as they are to mankind in
general, do yet more particularly secure to scholars and to the learned the
respect and consideration of commoner minds, to say nothing of the
Kuhschnappelian intelligences.
Unfortunately I have got to sing to another tune. In the town of
Kuhschnappel, as in all other towns, provincial, or metropolitan, what
Leibgeber was least of all conspicuous for was a proper gravity of
deportment and behaviour. Here, as elsewhere, his first proceeding was to
get an introduction to the club, as a stranger artist, in order that he might
ensconce himself on a sofa, and, without uttering a word or a syllable to a
human being, go to sleep under the noses of the company of the
“Relaxation” as the club was called. “This,” he said, “was what he liked to
have the opportunity of doing in all towns where there were clubs, casinos,
museums, musical societies, &c.; because to sleep in any rational manner at
night in one’s ordinary quiet bed was a thing which he, at least, found he
was seldom able to manage, on account of the loud battle of ideas which
went on in his head, and the firework trains of processions of pictures all
interweaving and whirling in and out with such a crash and a din that one
could hardly see or hear one’s self. Whereas when one lies down upon a
club sofa, everything of this sort quiets itself down, and a universal truce of
ideas establishes itself; the delicious effect of the company all talking at
once—the happily chosen and appropriate words contributed to the
political-and-other-conversation-picnic, of which one distinguishes nothing
but an ultima, perhaps, or sometimes only an antepenultima; this alone
sings you into a light slumber. But when a more serious discussion arises,
and some point is argued, disputed and discussed in all its bearings in a
universal clamorous shout—your barometer becomes completely stationary,
and you sleep the deep sleep of a flower which is rocked, but not awakened,
by the storm.”
One or two towns with which I am acquainted must, I am sure, remember
a stranger who always used to go to sleep in their clubs, and must also
recollect the beaming expression of countenance with which he would look

about him when he got up and took his hat, as much as to say, “Many
thanks for this refreshing rest.”
However, I have little to do with Leibgeber’s waking or with his sleeping
here in Kuhschnappel; him I may treat with some indulgence, seeing that he
is soon to be off again into the wide world. But it is anything but a matter of
indifference that my young hero, just established here with his wife, and
whose pranks I have undertaken to give some account of, as well as of the
hits he gets in return, should go and conduct himself just as if his name was
Leibgeber; which had long ceased to be the case, seeing that he had given
formal notice to his guardian that he had changed it to Siebenkæs.
To mention but one prank—was it not a piece of true tomfoolery that,
when the procession of poor scholars, singing for alms about the streets,
were just beginning their usual begging hymn under the windows of the
best religious families on the opposite side of the street, and just as they had
struck their key-note and were going to start off with their chorus,
Leibgeber, to begin with, made his boar-hound “Saufinder” (he couldn’t
live without a big dog) look out of window with a fashionable lady’s night-
cap on his head? And was it by any means a soberer proceeding on
Siebenkæs’s part, that he took lemons and bit into them before the eyes of
the whole singing class, so that all their teeth begun to water in an instant?
The result will answer these questions for itself. The singers, having
Saufinder in his night-cap in full view, could no more bring their lips
together into a singing position than a man can whistle and laugh at the
same instant. At the same time all their vocal apparatus being completely
submerged by the opening of their glands, every note they attempted to give
out had to wade painfully through water. In short, was this entire ludicrous
interruption of the whole company of street singers not the precise end
aimed at by both the advocates?
But Siebenkæs has only recently come back from college, and being still
half-full of the freedom of university life, may be excused a liberty or two.
And indeed I consider the little exuberances of university youth to be like
the adipose matter, which, according to Reaumur, Bonnet, and Cuvier, is
stored up by the caterpillar for the nourishment of the future butterfly
during its chrysalis state; the liberty of manhood has to be alimented by that
of youth, and if a son of the muse has not room given him to develop in full

freedom, he will never develop into anything but some office-holder
creeping along on all fours.
Meanwhile the two friends spent the following days—not wholly in a
disorderly manner—in the writing of marriage cards. With these, on which
of course there was nothing but the words, “Mr. Firmian Stanislaus
Siebenkæs, Poor’s Advocate, and his wife, née Engelkraut; with
compliments.”—with these papers, and with the lady, they were both to
drive about the town on the Saturday, and Leibgeber had to get down at all
the respectable houses and hand in a card, which is by no means otherwise
than a laudable and befitting custom in towns where people observe the
usages of good society. But the two brethren, Siebenkæs and Leibgeber,
appeared to follow these usages of imperial and rural towns more from
satirical motives than anything else, conforming to them pretty minutely, it
is true, but clearly chiefly for the fun of the thing, each of them playing the
part of first low comedian and of audience at the same time. It would be an
insult to the borough of Kuhschnappel to suppose that, notwithstanding
Siebenkæs’s zealous readiness to join in all the processions of the little
place, in and out of churches, to the town hall and the shooting-ground, it
was wholly unobservant of the satisfaction which it afforded him rather to
make fun of some properly ordered cortége, and mar the effect of it by his
unsuitable dress and absurd behaviour, than to be an ornament to it. And the
genuine eagerness with which he tried to get admitted as a member of the
Kuhschnappel shooting-club was ascribed rather to his love of a joke than
to his being the son of a keen sportsman. As for Leibgeber, he of course has
the very devil in him as regards all such matters; but he is younger than
Siebenkæs, and about to set out on his travels.
So they drove about the town on the Saturday—and where anybody in
the shape of a grandee lived they stopped, left their passengers’ tickets and
drove on, without any misbehaviour. Many ladies and gentlemen, it is true,
got the wrong sow by the ear, and confounded the card carrier with the
young husband sitting in the carriage; but the card carrier maintained his
gravity, knowing that fun has its own proper time. The cards (some of
which were glazed) were delivered according to the directory, firstly to the
members of the government, both of the greater and lesser council—to the
seventy members of the greater, and the thirteen of the lesser council;
consequently the judge, the treasurer, the two finance councillors, the
Heimlicher (so to say, tribune of the people) and the remaining eight

ordinary members—these constituting the said lesser council—each
received his card. After which the carriage drove down lower, and provided
the minor government officials in the various chambers and offices with
their cards, such as the Offices of Woods, of the Game Commissioners, the
Office of Reform (which latter was for the repression of luxury), and the
Meat Tax Commission, which was presided over by a single master butcher,
a very nice old man.
I am much afraid I have made a considerable slip, inasmuch as I have
drawn up no tables relative to the constitution, &c., of this imperial borough
of Kuhschnappel (which is properly a small imperial town, though it was
once a large one) to lay before the learned and statistical world. However, I
can’t possibly pull up here in the full gallop of my chapter, but must wait
till we all get to the end of it, when I can more conveniently open my
statistical warehouse.
The wheel of fortune soon began to rattle, and throw up mud; for when
Leibgeber took his eighth part of a placard of Siebenkæs’s marriage to the
house of his guardian, the Heimlicher von Blaise, a tall, meagre, barge-pole
of a woman, wrapped up in wimples of calico, the Heimlicher’s wife,
received it indeed, and with warmth, but warmth of the sort with which we
generally administer a cudgelling; moreover, she uttered the following
words (calculated to give rise to reflection)—
“My husband is the Heimlicher of this town, and what is more, he’s away
from home. He has nothing to do with seven cheeses;[13] he is tutor and
guardian to persons belonging to the highest and noblest families. You had
better be off as fast as you like; you’ve got hold of the wrong man here.”
“I quite think we have, myself,” said Leibgeber.
Siebenkæs, the ward, here tried to pacify his letter or paper carrier with
the woman a little, by suggesting that, like every good dog, she was but
barking at the strangers before fetching and carrying for them: and when his
friend, more anxious than himself, said, “You’re quite sure, are you not, that
you took proper legal precautions against any venomous ‘objections’ which
the guardian might make to paying up your money, on account of your
changing your name?” he assured him, that before he had established
himself as Siebenkæs, he had procured his guardian’s opinion and approval
in writing, which he would show him when they got home.

But when they did get home, Von Blaise’s letter was nowhere to be found
—it wasn’t in any of the boxes, nor in any of the college note-books, nor
even among the wastepaper—in fact, there was nothing of the kind.
“But what a donkey I am to bother about it!” cried Siebenkæs, “what do I
require it for, at all?”
Here Leibgeber, who had been glancing at the Saturday newspapers,
suddenly shoved them into his pocket, and said in a somewhat unwonted
tone of voice, “Come out, old boy, and let’s have a run in the fields.” When
they got there, he put into his hands the ‘Schaffhausen News,’ the ‘Swabian
Mercury,’ the ‘Stuttgart Times,’ and the ‘Erlangen Gazette,’ and said,
“These will enable you to form some idea of the sort of scoundrel you have
for a guardian.”
In each of these newspapers, the following notification appeared:—
“Whereas, Hoseas Heinrich Leibgeber, now in his 29th year, proceeded
to the University of Leipzig in 1774, but since that date has not been heard
of: now the said Hoseas Heinrich Leibgeber, is hereby, at the instance of his
cousin, Herr Heimlicher von Blaise, edictally cited and summoned by
himself or the lawful heirs of his body, within six months from the date of
these presents (whereof two months are hereby constituted the first term,
two months the second, and two months the third and peremptory term), to
appear within the Inheritance Office of this borough, and, on satisfactory
proof of identity, to receive over the sum of 1200 Rhenish gulden deposited
in the hands of the said Heimlicher von Blaise as trustee and guardian;
which failing, that, as directed by the decree of council of 24th July 1655
(which enacts, that any person who shall be for ten years absent from the
realm, shall be taken pro mortuo), the above-named sum of 1200 Rhenish
florins may be made over and paid to his said guardian and trustee, the
aforesaid Heimlicher von Blaise. Dated at Kuhschnappel in Swabia, the
20th August, 1785.
“Inheritance Office of the free Imperial Borough of Kuhschnappel.”
It is unnecessary to remind the legal reader that the decree of council
referred to is not in accordance with the legal usage of Bohemia, where
thirty-one years is the stipulated period, but with that which formerly
prevailed in France, when ten years were sufficient. And when the advocate
came to the end of the notice, and stared, motionless, at its concluding lines,

his soul’s brother took hold of his hand, and cried, “Alas! alas! it is I who
am to blame for all this, for changing names with you.”
“You?—oh, you? The devil alone, and nobody else. But I must find that
letter,” he said, and they made another search all over the house, in every
corner where a letter could be. After an hour of this Leibgeber hunted out
one with a broken seal of the guardian, of which the thick paper, and the
broad legal fold, without an envelope, told unmistakeably that it had been
addressed neither by a lady, a merchant, nor courtier, but by the quill of a
bird of quite a different tribe. However, there was nothing in this letter,
except Siebenkæs’s name in Siebenkæs’s own writing—not another word,
outside or inside. Quite natural; for the advocate had a bad habit of trying
his hand and his pen on the backs of letters, and writing his own name and
other people’s as well, with flourishes about them.
The letter had once been written in the inside, but, to save an incredible
waste of good paper, the Heimlicher von Blaise had written his concurrence
in the exchange of the names with an ink which vanishes from the paper of
itself, and leaves it, in integrum, white as it was before it was written on.
I may, perhaps, be doing a chance service to many persons of the better
classes, who nowadays more than ever have occasion to write promissory
notes and other business documents, if I here copy out for them the receipt
for this ink which vanishes after it is dry; I take it from a reliable source.
Let the man of rank scrape off the surface from a piece of fine black cloth,
such as he wears at court—grind the scrapings finer still on a piece of
marble—moisten this fine cloth dust repeatedly with water, then make his
ink with this, and write his promissory note with it; he will find that, as
soon as the moisture has evaporated, every letter of the promissory note has
flown away with it in the form of dust; the white star will have shone out, as
it were, through the blackness of the ink.
But I consider that I am doing an equal service to the holders and
presenters of such promissory notes as to the drawers of them, inasmuch as,
for the future, they will be careful not to be satisfied with a security of this
description, till they have exposed it for some time to the sun.
Some time ago, I should have here been apt to confound this cloth ink
with the sympathetic ink (likewise possessing the property of turning pale
and disappearing after a time), which is commonly made use of in both the
preliminary and final treaties entered into between royal persons; the latter

however, has a red tint. A treaty of peace of three years’ standing is no
longer legible to a man in the prime of life, because the red ink—the
encaustum, with which formerly no one but the Roman emperors might
write—is too apt to turn pale, unless a sufficient number of human beings
(from whom, as from the cochineal insect, this dye stuff is prepared) have
been made use of in its manufacture; and this (from motives of sordid
parsimony) is not always the case. So that the treaty has frequently to be
engraved and etched into the territory afresh with good instruments—the
so-called “instruments of peace”—at the point of the bayonet.
The two friends kept the happy young wife in ignorance of this first
thunderclap of the storm which was threatening her married life. On the
Sunday morning they went to make a friendly call on the Heimlicher during
the church service; unfortunately he was at church, however. They
postponed their entertaining visit till the afternoon; but then he himself was
paying one to the chapel of the orphan asylum, the whole blooming body of
the orphans, boys and girls, having previously made one to him, to enjoy
the privilege of kissing his hand in his capacity of superintendent of the
orphan asylum; for the inspectorship of that institution was, as he modestly
but truly observed, entrusted to his unworthy hands. After the evening
sermon, he had to perform a service of his own in his own house, in short,
he was fenced off from the two advocates by a triple row of spiritual altar
rails. It was his admirable custom to permit the members of his household,
not indeed to eat, but to pray at the same table with him. He thought it well
to spend the Sunday as a day of labour in psalm-singing with them,
because, by such devotional exercises, he best preserved them from sins of
Sabbath breaking, such as working on their own account, at sewing,
mending, &c. And, on the whole, he thought it well to make of the Sunday
in this manner a day of preparation for the coming week, just as actors in
places where Sunday representations are not allowed, have their rehearsals
on that day.
However, I recommend people in delicate health not to go near or smell
at this sort of beautiful sky-blue plants which grow in the Church’s vineyard
only to be looked at, as an English garden is adorned with the pretty aconite
and its sky- or Jesuit’s-blue poisonous flowers, which grow pyramidally to
man’s height.[14] People like Von Blaise, not only ascend Mount Sinai and
the Golgotha, that, like goats, they may feed as they climb; but they occupy
these sacred heights for the purpose of making attacks and incursions from

them, just as good generals take possession of the hills, and particularly the
gallows-hills. The Heimlicher mounts from earth to the heavens oftener
than Blanchard does, and with similar motives, indeed, he can keep his soul
on the wing in these elevated regions for half a day at a time, in which
respect, however, he does not quite equal the King of Siam’s dragon kites
which the mandarins, by relieving each other at the task, manage to keep up
in the sky for a couple of months at a time. He soars, not as the lark does, to
make music, but as the noble falcon does, to swoop down upon something
or other. If you see him praying on a Mount of Olives, be sure that he’s
going to build an oil mill on it; and if he weeps by a brook Kedron, depend
upon it he’s either going a-fishing in it, or else thinking of pitching
somebody into it. He prays with the object of luring to him the ignes-fatui
of sins; he kneels, but only as a front rank does, to deliver its fire at the foe
before it; he opens his arms as with warm benevolent affection, to fold
home one, a ward say, in their embrace, but only in the manner of the red-
hot Moloch, that he may burn him to cinders; or he folds his arms piously
together, but does it as the machines called “maidens” did, only to cut
people to pieces.
At last the friends, in their anxiety, came to see that there are some people
whom one can only manage to get access to when one comes as thieves do,
unannounced so at 8 o’clock on the Sunday evening they walked, sans
façon, into Von Blaise’s house. Everything was still and empty; they went
through an empty hall into an empty drawing-room, the half-open folding
doors of which led into the household chapel. All they could see through the
crevice was six chairs, an open hymn-book lying on its face on each of
them, and a table with wax-cloth cover, on which were Miller’s ‘Heavenly
Kiss of the Soul,’ and Schlichthoher’s ‘Five-fold Dispositions for all
Sundays and Feasts of the Church.’ They pressed through the gap, and lo
and behold! there was the Heimlicher all alone, continuing his devotions in
his sleep, with his cap under his arm. His house- and church-servants had
read to him till sleep had stiffened him to a petrifaction, or pillar of salt (an
event which occurred every Sunday), for his eyes and his head were alike
heavy with the edible, the potable, and the spiritual, refreshment of which
he had partaken; or because he was like many who think it well to close
their eyes during the sowing of the heavenly seed, just as people do when
their heads are being powdered, or because churches and private chapels are
still like those ancient temples in which the communications of the oracles

were received during sleep. And as soon as they saw his eyes closed, the
servants would read more and more softly, to accustom him gradually to the
complete cessation of the sound; and, by and by, the devout domestics
would steal gently away, leaving him in his attitude of prayer till 10
o’clock; at that hour (when, moreover, Madame von Blaise generally came
home from paying visits) the domestic sacristan and night watchman would
rouse him from his sleep with a shrill “Amen,” and he would put something
on to his bald head again.
This evening matters fell out differently. Leibgeber rapped loudly on the
table two or three times with the knuckle of his forefinger to wake the city’s
father out of his first sleep. When he opened his eyes and saw before him
the two lean parodies and copies of one another, he took, in his beer- and
sleep-heaviness of idea, a glass periwig from off a block, and put that on his
head instead of his cap, which had fallen down. His ward addressed him
politely, saying he wished to present to him his friend with whom he had
made the exchange of names. He likewise called him his “kind cousin and
guardian.” Leibgeber, more angry and less self-contained, because he was
younger, and because the wrong had not been done to him, fired into the
Heimlicher’s ears, from a position closer to him by three discourteous
paces, the inquiries, “Which of us two is it that your worship has given out
pro mortuo, that you may be able to cite him as a dead man? There are the
ghosts of two of us here both together.” Blaise turned with a lofty air from
Leibgeber to Siebenkæs, and said, “If you have not changed your dress, sir,
as well as your name, I believe you are the gentleman whom I have had the
honour of talking with on several previous occasions. Or was it you, sir?”
he said to Leibgeber, who shook like one possessed. “Well,” he continued in
a more pleasant tone, “I must confess to you, Mr. Siebenkæs, that I had
always supposed, until now, that you were the person who left this for the
university ten years ago, and whose little inheritance I then assumed the
guardianship or curatorship of. What probably chiefly contributed to my
mistake, if it be a mistake, was, I presume, the likeness which, præter
propter, you certainly seem to bear to my missing ward; for in many details
you undoubtedly differ from him; for instance, he had a mole beside his
ear.”
“The infernal mole,” interrupted Leibgeber, “was obliterated by means of
a toad, on my account entirely, because it was like an ass’s ear, and he never
thought that, when he lost his ear, he should lose a relative along with it.”

“That may be,” said the guardian coldly, “You must prove to me, Herr
Advocate, that it was to YOU I had been thinking of paying over the
inheritance to-day; for your announcement that you had exchanged your
family name for that of an utter stranger I considered to be probably one of
the jokes for which you are so celebrated. But I learned last week that you
had been proclaimed in church and married in the name of Siebenkæs, and
more to the same effect. I then discussed the question with Herr
Grossweibel (the President of the Chamber of Inheritance), and with my
son-in-law, Herr von Knärnschilder, and they assured me I should be acting
contrary to my duty and safety if I let this property out of my hands. What
would you do—they very properly said—what answer would you have to
make if the real owner of the name were to appear and demand another
settlement of the guardianship accounts? It would be too bad, truly, for a
man, who, besides his manifold business of other kinds, undertook this
troublesome guardian work, which the law does not require him to do,
purely from affection for his relative, and from the love which he bears to
all his brethren of mankind[15]—it would be too bad, I say, for him to have
to pay up this money a second time out of his own pocket. At the same
time, Mr. Siebenkæs, as, in my capacity of a private individual, I am more
disposed to admit the validity of your claim than you perhaps suppose, you
being a lawyer, know quite as well as I that my individual conviction carries
with it no legal weight whatever, and that I have to deal with this matter not
as a man, but as a guardian—it would probably be the best course to let
some third party less biassed in my favour, such as the Inheritance Office,
decide the question. Let me have the satisfaction, Mr. Siebenkæs, as soon as
it may be possible” (he ended more smilingly, and laying his hand on the
other’s shoulder) “to see that which I hope may prove the case, namely, that
you are my long-missing cousin, Leibgeber, properly established by legal
proof.”
“Then,” said Leibgeber, grimly calm, and with all kinds of scale-passages
and fugatos coursing over the colour-piano of his face, “is the little bit of
resemblance which Mr. Siebenkæs there has to—to himself, that is to say, to
your worship’s ward, to be taken as proving nothing; not even as much as
an equal similarity in a case of comparatio literarum would prove?”
“Oh, of course,” said Blasius, “something, certainly, but not everything;
for there were several false Neros, and three or four sham Sebastians in
Portugal; suppose, now, you should be my cousin yourself, Mr. Leibgeber!”

Leibgeber jumped up at once, and said in an altered and joyful voice, “So
I am, my dearest guardian—it was all done to try you—I hope you will
pardon my friend his share in the little mystification.”
“All very well,” answered Blasius, more inflatedly, “but your own
changes of ground must show you the necessity for a proper legal
investigation.”
This was more than Siebenkæs could endure, he squeezed his friend by
the hand, as much as to say, “Pray be patient,” and inquired in a voice
which an unwonted feeling of hatred rendered faint, “Did you never write to
me when I was in Leipzig?”—“If you are my ward, I certainly did, many
times; if you are not, you have got hold of my letters in some other way.”
Then Siebenkæs asked, more faintly still, “Have you no recollection at all
of a letter in which you assured me there was not the slightest risk involved
in my proposed change of name, none whatever?”
“This is really quite ludicrous,” answered Blaise, “in that case there could
be no question about the matter!”
Here Leibgeber clasped the father of the city with his two fingers as if
they had been iron rivets, grasped his shoulders as one does the pommel of
a saddle at mounting, clamped him firmly into his chair, and thundered out,
“You never wrote anything of the kind, did you? you smooth-tongued, grey-
headed old scoundrel! Stop your grunting, or I’ll throttle you! never wrote
the letter, eh? keep quiet—if you lift a finger, my dog will tear your
windpipe out. Answer me quietly you say you never received any letter on
the subject, do you?”
“I had rather say nothing,” whispered Blasius, “evidence given under
coercion is valueless.”
Here Siebenkæs drew his friend away from the Heimlicher, but
Leibgeber said to the dog, “Mordax! hooy, Sau.,” took the glass periwig
from the head of the servant of the state, broke off the principal curls of it,
and said to Siebenkæs (Saufinder lay ready to spring), “Screw him down
yourself, if the dog is not to do it, that he may listen to me. I want to say
one or two pretty things to him—don’t let him say ‘Pap!’—Herr Heimlicher
von Blasius, I have not the slightest intention of making use of libellous or
abusive language to you, or of spouting an improvised pasquinade; I merely
tell you, that you are an old rascal, a robber of orphans, a varnished villain,
and everything else of the kind—for instance, a Polish bear, whose

footmarks are just like a human being’s.[16] The epithets which I here make
use of, such as scoundrel—Judas—gallows-bird” (at each word he struck
the glass turban like a cymbal against his other hand), “skunk, leech, horse-
leech—nominal definitions such as these are not abuse, and do not
constitute libel, firstly because, according to ‘L. § de injur.,’ the grossest
abuse may be uttered in jest, and I am in jest here—and we may always
make use of abusive language in maintaining our own rights—see
‘Leyser.’[17] Indeed, according to Quistorp’s ‘Penal Code,’ we may accuse a
person of the gravest crimes without animus injurandi, provided that he has
not been already tried and punished for them. And has your honesty ever
been put on its trial and punished, you cheating old grey-headed vagabond?
I suppose you are like the Heimlicher in Freyburg[18]—rather a different
sort of man to you, it’s to be hoped—and have half-a-dozen years or so,
during which no one can lay hold of you—but I’ve got hold of you to-day,
hypocrite! Mordax!” The dog looked up at this word of command.
“Let him go, now,” Siebenkæs begged, compassionating the prostrate
sinner.
“In a moment; but don’t you put me in a fury, please,” said Leibgeber,
letting fall the plucked wig, standing on it, and taking out his scissors and
black paper, “I want to be quite calm while I clip out a likeness of the
padded countenance of this portentous cotton-nightcap of a creature,
because I shall take it away with me as a gage d’amour. I want to carry this
ecce homunculus about with me half over the world, and say to everybody,
‘Hit it, bang away at it well; blessed is he who doth not depart this life till
he hath thrashed Heimlicher Blasius of Kuhschnappel; I would have done it
myself if I had not been far too strong.’
“I shan’t be able,” he went on, turning to Siebenkæs, and finishing a good
portrait, “to give that sneak and sharper there an account by word of mouth
of my success, for a whole year to come; but by that time the one or two
little touches of abuse which I have just lightly applied to him will be
covered by the statute of limitations, and we shall be as good friends as ever
again.”
Here he unexpectedly requested Siebenkæs to stay by Saufinder—whom
he had constituted into a corps of observation by a motion of his finger—as
he was obliged to leave the room for a moment. On the last occasion of his
being in Blaise’s grand drawing-room (where he displayed his magnificence

before the Kuhschnappel world, great and small), he had noticed the paper-
hangings there, and an exceedingly ingenious stove, in the form of the
goddess of justice, Themis, who does, indeed, singe as frequently as she
merely warms. And this time he had brought with him a camel’s-hair pencil,
and a bottle of an ink made from cobalt dissolved in aquafortis, with a little
muriatic acid dropped into it. Unlike the black cloth ink, which is visible at
first and disappears afterwards, the sympathetic ink here spoken of is
invisible at first, and only comes out a green colour on the paper when it is
warmed. Leibgeber now wrote with his camel’s-hair pencil and this ink the
following invisible notification on the paper which was closest to the stove,
or Themis.
“The Goddess of Justice hereby protests in presence of this assembly
against being thus set up in effigy, and warmed and cooled (if not absolutely
hanged), at the pleasure of the Heimlicher von Blaise, who is long since
condemned at her inner secret tribunal.

“Themis.”

Leibgeber came away, leaving the silent seed of this Priestley’s green
composition behind him on the wall with the pleasing certainty that next
winter, some evening when the drawing-room was nicely warmed by the
goddess for a party, the whole dormant green crop would all of a sudden
shoot lustily forth.
So he came back to the oratory again, finding Saufinder keeping up his
appointed official contemplation, and his friend maintaining his observation
of the dog. They then all took a most polite leave, and even begged the
Heimlicher not to come into the street with them, as it mightn’t be so easy
to keep Mordax from a bite or so there.
When they got to the street Leibgeber said to his friend, “Don’t pull such
a long face about it—I shall keep flying backwards and forwards to you, of
course. Come through the gate with me—I must get across the frontier of
this country; let’s run, and get on to royal territory before six minutes are
over our heads.”
When they had passed the gate, that is to say, the un-Palmyra-like ruins
of it, the crystal reflecting grotto of the August night stood open and shining
above the dark-green earth, and the ocean-calm of nature stayed the wild

storm of the human heart. Night was drawing and closing her curtain (a sky
full of silent suns, not a breath of breeze moving in it), up above the world
and down beneath it; the reaped corn stood in the sheaves without a rustle.
The cricket with his one constant song, and a poor old man gathering snails
for the snail-pits, seemed to be the only things that dwelt in the far reaching
darkness. The fires of anger had suddenly gone out in the two friends’
hearts. Leibgeber said, in a voice pitched two octaves lower, “God be
thanked! this writes a verse of peace round the storm bell within! the night
seems to me to have muffled my alarum drum with her black robe, and
softened it down to a funeral march. I am delighted to find myself growing
a little sad after all that anger and shouting.”
“If it only hadn’t all been on my account, old Henry,” said Siebenkæs,
“your humorous fury at that barefaced old sinner.”
“Though you are not so apt to shy your satire into people’s faces as I
am,” said Leibgeber, “you would have been in a greater rage if you had
been in my place. One can bear injustice to one’s self—particularly when
one has as good a temper as I have—but not to a friend. And unluckily you
are the martyr to my name to-day, and eyewitness and blood-witness into
the bargain. Besides, I should tell you that, as a general rule, when once I
am ridden by the devil of anger—or rather when I have got on to his back—
I always spur the brute nearly to death, till he falls down, so that I mayn’t
have to mount him again for the next three months. However, I have poured
you out a nice basin of black broth, and left you sitting with the spoon in
your hand.” Siebenkæs had been dreading for some time that he would say
something about the 1200 gulden, those baptismal dues of his re-baptism,
the discount of his name. He therefore said, as cheerfully and pleasantly as
his heart, torn by this sudden, nocturnal parting, would let him, “My wife
and I have plenty of supplies in our little bit of a fortress of Konigstein, and
we can sow and reap there too. Heaven only grant that we may have many a
hard nut to crack; they give a delicious flavour to the table-wine of our
stale, flat, everyday life. I shall bring my action to-morrow.”
They both concealed their emotion at the approach of the moment of
parting under the cloak of comic speeches. These two counterparts came to
a column which had been erected by the Princess of —— on the spot
where, on her return from England, she had met her sister coming from the
Alps; and as this joyful souvenir of a meeting had a quite opposite

significance to-night, Leibgeber said, “Now, right about face—march! Your
wife is getting anxious—it’s past eleven o’clock. There, you see, we have
reached your boundary mark, your frontier fortress, the gallows. I am off at
once into Bayreuth and Saxony to cut my crop—other people’s faces, to
wit, and sometimes my own fool’s face into the bargain. I shall most likely
come and see you again, just for the fun of the thing, in a year and a day,
when the verbal libels are pretty well out of date. By the by.” he added,
hastily, “promise me on your word of honour to do me one little favour.”
Siebenkæs instantly did so. “Don’t send my deposit after me[19]—a
plaintiff has payments to make. So fare you well, dearest old man,” he
blurted huskily out, and after a hurried kiss, ran quickly down the little hill
with an air of assumed unconcern. His friend, bewildered and forsaken,
looked after the runner, without uttering a syllable. When he got to the
bottom of the hillock, the runner stopped, bent his head low towards the
ground, and—loosened his garters.
“Couldn’t you have done that up here?” cried Siebenkæs, and went down
to him, and said, “We’ll go as far as the gallows hill together.” The sand-
bath and reverberating furnace of a noble anger made all their emotions
warmer to-day, just as a hot climate gives strength to poisons and spices. As
the first parting had caused their eyes to overflow, they had nothing more to
keep in control but voice and language.
“Are you sure you feel quite well after being so much vexed?” said
Siebenkæs. “If the death of domestic animals portends the death of the
master of the house, as the superstition runs,” said Leibgeber, “I shall live to
all eternity, for my menagerie[20] of beasts is all alive and kicking.” At last
they stopped at the market house, beside the place of execution. “Just up to
the top,” said Siebenkæs, “no further.”
When they came to the top of this boundary-hill of so many an unhappy
life—and when Siebenkæs looked down upon the green spotted stone altar
where so many an innocent sacrifice had been offered up, and thought, in
that dark minute, of the heavy blood drops of agony, the burning tears
which women who had killed their children[21] (and were themselves put to
death by the state and their lovers) had let fall upon this their last and
briefest rack of torture here in this field of blood—and as he gazed from
this cloudbank of life out over the broad earth with the mists of night
steaming up round its horizons and over all its streams—he took his friend’s

hand, and, looking to the free starry heaven, said, “The mists of our life on
earth must be resolved into stars, up there at last, as the mists of the milky
way part into suns. Henry, don’t you yet believe in the soul’s
immortality?”—“It will not do yet, I can not,” Leibgeber replied. “Blasius,
now, hardly deserves to live once, let alone twice or several times. I
sometimes can’t help feeling as if a little piece of the other world had been
painted on to this, just to finish it off and make it complete, as I’ve
sometimes seen subsidiary subjects introduced in fainter colours towards
the edge of a picture, to make the principal subject stand out from the
frame, and to give it unity of effect. But at this moment, human beings
strike me as being like those crabs which priests used to fasten tapers to and
set them crawling about churchyards, telling the people they were the souls
of the departed. Just so do we, in a masquerade impersonation of immortal
beings, crawl about over graves with our tapers of souls. Ten to one they go
out at last.”
His friend fell on his heart, and said with vivid conviction, “We do not go
out! Farewell a thousand times. We shall meet where there is no parting. By
my soul! we do not go out. Farewell, farewell.”
And so they parted. Henry passed slowly and with drooping arms
through the footpaths between the stubble-fields, raising neither hand nor
eye, that he might give no sign of sorrow. But a deep grief fell on
Siebenkæs, for men who rarely shed tears shed all the more when they do
weep. So he went to his house and laid his weary melting heart to rest on
his wife’s untroubled breast (there was not even a dream stirring it). But far
on into the forecourt of the world of dreams did the thought of the days in
store for Lenette attend him—and of his friend’s night journey under the
stars, which he would be looking up at without any hope of ever being
nearer to them; and it was chiefly for his friend that his tears flowed fast.
Oh ye two friends—thou who art out in the darkness there, and thou who
art here at home! But wherefore should I be continually harping back upon
the old emotion which you have once more awakened in me—the same
which in old days used to penetrate and refresh me so when I read as a lad
about the friendship of a Swift, an Arbuthnott and a Pope in their letters?
Many another heart must have been fired and aroused as mine was at the
contemplation of the touching, calm affection which the hearts of these men
felt for one another; cold, sharp, and cutting to the outer world, in the inner

land which was common to them they could work and beat for each other;
like lofty palm trees, presenting long sharp spines towards the common
world below them, but at their summits full of the precious palm-wine of
strong friendship.
So, in their lesser degree, I think we may find something of a similar kind
to like and to admire in our two friends, Leibgeber and Siebenkæs. We need
not inquire very closely into the causes which brought about their
friendship; for it is hate, not love, which needs to be explained and
accounted for. The sources whence everything that is good wells forth from
this universe upwards to God himself, are veiled by a night all thick with
stars; but the stars are very far away.
These two men, while as yet in the fresh, green springtime of university
life, at once saw straight through each other’s breasts into each other’s
hearts, and they attracted each other with their opposite poles. What chiefly
delighted Siebenkæs was Leibgeber’s firmness and power, and even his
capability of anger, as well as his flights and laughter over every kind of
sham grandeur, sham fine feeling, sham scholarship. Like the condor, he
laid the eggs (of his act or of his pregnant saying) in no nest, but on the bare
rock, preferring to live without a name, and consequently always taking
some other than his own. On which account the poor’s advocate used to tell
him, ten times over, the two following anecdotes, just to enjoy his irritation
at them.
The first was, that a German professor in Dorpat, who was delivering a
eulogistic address on the subject of the reigning grand duke Alexander,
suddenly stopped in the middle of it, and gazed for a long time in silence on
a bust of that potentate, saying at length, “The speechless heart has spoken.”
The second was that Klopstock sent finely got-up copies of his ‘Messiah’
to schoolporters, with the request that the most deserving among them
might scatter spring-flowers on the grave of his own old teacher, Stubel,
while softly pronouncing his (Klopstock’s) name. To which, if Leibgeber
had anything to adduce on the subject, Siebenkæs would go on to add that
the poet had called up four new porters to give them three readings apiece
from his ‘Messiah,’ rewarding each with a gold medal provided by a friend.
After telling him this he would look to see Leibgeber’s foaming and
stamping at a person’s thus worshipping himself as a species of reliquary
full of old fingers and bones.

What Leibgeber, on the other hand,—more like the Morlacks, who, as
Towinson and Forlis tell us, though they have but one word to express both
revenge and sanctification (osveta), do yet have their friends betrothed to
them with a blessing at the altar—chiefly delighted in and loved about his
satirical foster-brother was the diamond brooch which in his case pinned
together poetry, kindly temper, and a stoicism which scorned this world’s
absurdities. And lastly, each of them daily enjoyed the gratification of
knowing that the other understood him completely and wonderfully,
whether he were in jest or in earnest. But it is not every friend who meets
with another of this stamp.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER II.

GOVERNMENT OF THE IMPERIAL MARKET BOROUGH OF
KUHSCHNAPPEL.

I have omitted, all through two chapters, to state that the free imperial
borough of Kuhschnappel (of which, it appears, there is a namesake in the
Erzgebirge country) is the thirty-second of the Swabian towns which takes
its seat on Swabia’s town-bench of thirty-one towns. Swabia may look upon
herself as being a hotbed and forcing-house of imperial towns, these
colonies, or hostelries, of the goddess of freedom in Germany, whom
persons of position worship as their household goddess; and according to
whose “election of grace” it is that poor sinners are called to salvation. I
must now, in this place, accede to the universally expressed desire for an
accurate sketch map of the Kuhschnappel Government; though few readers,
save people such as Nikolai, Schlæzer and the like, can be expected to form
an idea of the difficulty I have experienced, and the sum I have had to
expend in postage, before getting hold of information somewhat more
accurate than that which is generally current on the subject of
Kuhschnappel. Indeed, imperial towns, like Swiss towns, always plaster
over and stop up the combs where their honey is stored, as though their
constitutions were stolen silver plate with the owner’s name still
unobliterated—or as though the little bits of towns and territories were
fortresses (which indeed they are as against their own inhabitants more than
against their enemies), of which strangers are not allowed to take sketches.
The constitution of our noteworthy borough of Kuhschnappel seems to
have been the original rough draft or sketch which Bern (a place at no great
distance) has copied hers from, only with the pantograph on a larger scale.
For Bern, like Kuhschnappel, has her Upper House, or supreme council,
which decides upon peace and war, and has the power of life and death just
as in Kuhschnappel, and consists of chief magistrates, treasurers, Venners,

Heimlichers and counsellors, only that there are more of them in Bern than
in Kuhschnappel. Further, Bern has her Lower House, consisting of
presidents, deputies and pensioners, subsidiary to the Upper. The two
Chambers of Appeal, those of Woods and Forests, Game Laws, and Reform,
the Meat Tax and other commissions are clearly but large text copies of the
Kuhschnappel outlines.
To speak the truth, however, I have drawn this comparison between these
two places solely with the view of being comprehensible (perhaps at the
same time agreeable) to the Swiss generally, and particularly to the people
of Bern. For in reality, Kuhschnappel rejoices in a much more perfect and
aristocratic constitution than Bern, such as was to be found in a measure in
Ulm and Nürnberg, though the stormy weather of the revolution has rather
kept them back than brought them forward. A short time since, Nürnberg
and Ulm were as fortunate as Kuhschnappel is now, inasmuch as they were
governed, not by the common, working classes, but by people of family
only, so that no mere citizen could meddle with the matter in the least
degree either in person or by deputy. Now, unfortunately, it appears to be
the case in both towns that the cask of the state has had to be fresh tapped
just about an inch or so above the thick dregs of the common herd, because
what came from the tap nearer the top proved sour. However, it is
impossible for me to go on until I have cleared out of the way a much too
prevalent error respecting large towns.
The Behemoths and Condors among towns—Petersburg, London, Vienna
—might, if they chose, establish universal equality of liberty and liberty of
equality; very few statisticians have been struck by this idea, although it is
so very clear. For a capital which it takes two hours and a quarter to go
round is, as it were, an Ætna-crater of equivalent circumference for an
entire country, and benefits the neighbourhood of it as the volcano does, not
only by what it ejects (its eruptive matter), but by what it swallows up. It
clears the country in the first place of villages, and next of country towns—
which are primarily the outhouses and office-buildings of capital cities—
inasmuch as it pushes itself outwards in all directions year by year, and gets
grown over, fringed round, and walled about with the villages. London, we
know, has converted the neighbouring villages into streets of itself; but in
the lapse of centuries the long, constantly extending arms of all great towns
must enfold not only the villages, but also the country towns, converting
them into suburbs. Now, in this process, the roads, fields and meadows

which lie between the giant city and the villages get covered over like a
river-bed with a deposit of stone-paving; and consequently the operations of
agriculture can no longer be carried on otherwise than in flower-pots in the
windows. Where there is no agriculture, I cannot see what the agricultural
population can become but unemployed idlers, such as no state allows
within its boundaries; and, prevention being better than cure, the state will
have to clear this agricultural population out of the way before it sinks into
this condition of idling, either by means of letters inhibitory directed against
the increase of population, or by extermination, or by ennobling them into
soldiery and domestics. In a village which has undergone this process of
being morticed into a town like a lump of rubble,—or converted into a stave
of the great tun of Heidelberg in this manner—any country people that
might be still to the fore, would be as ludicrous as useless; the coral cells of
the villages must be cleared out before they attain the dignity of becoming
reefs or atolls of a town.
When this is done, the hardest step towards equality has, no doubt, been
taken; the people of the country towns, a class the most hostile of all
classes, at heart, to equality—have next to be attacked and, if possible,
exterminated by the great town; this, however, is more a matter of time than
of good management. At the same time, what one or two residency-towns
have accomplished in this direction, is a good beginning at all events. Could
we attain to our ideal, however—could we live to see the day when the two
classes who are the most formidable opponents of equality—the peasants,
and the people of the smaller towns—should have disappeared; and when
not only the agricultural races but the lower nobility, the small proprietors,
should be extinct—ah! then the world would be in the blissful enjoyment of
an equality of a nobler sort than that which obtained in France, where it was
merely a plebeian one. There would be an absolute equality if pure nobility
and collective humanity could rejoice in the possession of one patent of
nobility, and of real authentic ancestors. In Paris, the revolution wrote (as
people did in the most ancient times) without capital letters; but if my
golden age came to pass, the writing would be as it was in somewhat later
times than those just alluded to, all capital letters, not, as at present, with
capitals sticking up like steeples among quantities of small letters. But
though such a lofty style, such an ennoblement of humanity as this may be
nothing but a beautiful dream, and though we must be content with the
minor consolation of seeing, in towns, the middle classes restricted to a

single street, as is now the case with the Jews; even that would be a clear
gain to the intellectual portion of mankind in the eyes of anyone who
considers what an accomplished, capable set of people the higher nobility
are.
It is upon the smaller towns, however, that we can more confidently rely
than upon the great residency-towns, for aid in bringing about the
nobilisation of the collective human race, and this brings me back to
Kuhschnappel. People really seem to forget that it is too much to expect that
the four square versts or so which a residency-town occupies shall be able
to dominate, swallow up, and convert into portions of itself, more than a
thousand square miles of the surrounding country (just as the boa-
constrictor swallows animals bigger than itself). London has not much
above 600,000 inhabitants; what a miserably small force compared to the
5½ millions of all England, which that city has to contend with, and cut off
the wings, and supplies of, alone and unassisted—to say nothing of
Scotland and Ireland! This, however, does not apply to provincial towns;
here the number of villages, villagers, and burghers which have to be
coerced, starved, and put to rout, are in a fair proportion to the size of the
town, the numbers of the aristocracy or governing classes, who have to
execute the task, and work the smoothing plane which is to level the surface
of humanity. Here there is little difficulty in precipitating the citizens (as if
they were a kind of coarse dregs swimming in the clear fluid of nobility);
and when this precipitation is not successfully accomplished, it is the
aristocracy themselves who are to blame, in that they often show mercy in
the wrong place, and look upon the Burgher-bank as a grassbank, the grass
of which is, it is true, grown only to be sat upon and pressed down, but is
kept always watered, in order that it may not wither from being so
constantly sat upon. If there were to be nothing left but the noblest classes,
the citizenic cinnamon-trees would be completely barked, by means of
taxes and levyings of contributions—(which none but plebeian authors term
“flaying” and “pulling the hide over the ears”),—and, the bark being off,
the trees of course wither and die. At the same time, this process of
aristocratization costs men. But in my opinion it would be cheaply
purchased by the few thousands of people it would cost, seeing that the
Americans, the Swiss, and the Dutch paid (so to speak) whole millions of
men “cash down,” on the battlefield, as the price of a freedom of a much
more restricted kind. The fault which is sometimes found with modern

battle pictures, namely that they are overcrowded with people, can rarely be
found with modern countries. We should rather notice the clever manner in
which many German states have, by energetic treatment, determined their
population, as morbid matter, in a downward direction (as good physicians
are wont to do), namely, down to the United States of America, which are
situated straight below them.
Kuhschnappel (to return to our subject) has the pull over hundreds of
other towns. I admit, as Nicolai’s assertion, that of the 60,000 which
Nürnberg contained there are but 30,000 left, and that is something; at the
same time it takes fifty burghers, and more, to be equivalent to one
aristocrat, which is much. Now I am in a position to show at any moment
by reference to registers of deaths and baptisms, that the borough of
Kuhschnappel contains almost as many aristocrats as burghers, which is all
the more wonderful when we reflect that the former, on account of their
appetites, find it a harder matter to live than the latter. What modern town, I
ask, can point to so many free inhabitants? Were there not even in free
Athens and Rome—in the West Indies there were of course—more slaves
than free men, for which reason the latter did not dare to make the former
wear any distinctive dress? And are there not in all towns more tenants than
noble landlords, although the latter ought, one would think, to be in the
majority, since peasants and burghers grow only by nature, while aristocrats
are raised, both by nature, and by art (in the shape of princely and imperial
chanceries). If this appendix were not a digression (and digressions are
generally expected to be brief) I should proceed to show, at some length,
that in several respects Kuhschnappel, if she does not surpass, is at least
quite on a par with, many of the towns of Switzerland; for instance, in a
good method of sharpening and lengthening the sword of justice, and, on
the whole, in her manner of wielding a good, spiked, knotty mace—in the
tax she levies on (ecclesiastical) corn, not that imported from abroad, but
that of home growth, to exclude thought and other (in an ecclesiastical
sense) rubbish of that sort—and even in her “green market,” or trade in
young men. As regards the latter, the reason why the trade with France for
young Kuhschnappelers to serve as porters and defenders of the Crown has
hitherto been so flat is, that the Swiss have so terribly overdone the market
with fine young fellows who go and stand in front of all the doors and (in
war time) in front of all the cannons. Of course, were it not for this, there
would be more doors than one with a Kuhschnappeler standing and saying,

“Nobody at home.” (Indeed, here in my second edition, I can assert that
Kuhschnappel continues to maintain its title of imperial market town, like a
secondary electoral dignity, and keeps up its old protective laws against the
import of ideas and the export of information, and its blood tithe; or young
men tithe to France, just as Switzerland does, which is like the keeper of the
castle of the Wartburg, who keeps constantly re-blackening the indelible
mark of the ink which Luther threw at the devil.)

CHAPTER III.

LENETTE’S HONEYMOON—BOOK BREWING—SCHULRATH
STIEFEL—MR. EVERARD—A DAY BEFORE THE FAIR—THE
RED COW—ST. MICHAEL’S FAIR—THE BEGGARS’ OPERA
—DIABOLICAL TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS, OR
THE MANNIKIN OF FASHION—AUTUMN JOYS—A NEW
LABYRINTH.
The world could not make a greater mistake than to suppose that our
common hero would be to be seen on the Monday sitting in a mourning
coach, in a mourning cloak, crape hat-band and scarf, and black shoe-
buckles, figuring as chief mourner at the sham funeral of his happiness and
his capital.
Heavens! how can the world make such an exceedingly bad shot as that?
The advocate was not even in quarter mourning, let alone half; he was in as
good spirits as if he had this third chapter before him, and were just
beginning it, as I am.
The reason was, that he had drawn up an able plaint against his guardian,
Blaise (enlivening it with sundry satirical touches, which nobody but
himself understood), and laid it before the Inheritance Office. When we are
in a difficulty, it is always so much gained if we can but do something or
other. Let fortune bluster in our faces with ever so harsh and frosty an
autumn wind—as long as it does not break the fore joint of our wing (as in
the case of the swans), our very fluttering, though it may not transport us
into a warmer climate, will at all events have the effect of warming us a
little. From motives of kindness, Siebenkæs kept his wife in ignorance of
the delay in the settling of his heritage accounts, as well as of the old story
of the change of names; he thought there was very little likelihood of a
struggling advocate’s wife ever having an opportunity of looking over a
patrician’s shoulder into his family hand at cards.

And, indeed, what could a man who had made a sudden plunge from out
his hermit’s holy-week of single blessedness, into the full honeymoon of
double blessedness wish for besides? Not until now had he been able to
hold his Lenette in both his arms rightly—hitherto his friend, always
fluttering backwards and forwards in life, had been held fast with his left
arm; but now, she was able to stretch herself out far more comfortably in
the chambers of his heart. And the bashful wife did this as much as she
dared. She confessed to him, albeit timidly, that she was almost glad not to
have that boisterous Saufinder lying under the table and glaring out in that
terrible way of his. Whether she experienced a similar relief at the absence
of his wild master, she could not be brought to say. To the advocate she felt
a good deal like a daughter, and her great tall father could never have
enough of her quaint little ways. That, when he went out, she used to look
after him as long as he was in sight, was nothing in comparison to the way
in which she used to run out after him with a brush, when she noticed from
the window that there was such a quantity of street paving sticking to his
coat-tails that nothing would do but she must have him back again into the
house, and brush his back as clean as if the Kuhschnappel municipality
would charge him paving-tax if any of the mud were found on him. He
would take hold of the brush and stop it, and kiss her, and say, “There’s a
good deal inside as well; but nobody sees it there; when I come back we’ll
set to work and scrub some of that away.”
Her maidenly obedience to his every wish and hint, her daughterly
observance and fulfilment of them, were more than he looked for or
required, indeed; but not too great for the love he bestowed in return.
“Senate clerk’s daughter,” he said, “you mustn’t be too obedient to me;
remember I’m not your father, a senate clerk, but a poor’s advocate who has
married you and signs himself Siebenkæs, to the best of his belief.”
“My poor dear father,” she answered, “used often to compose and write
down things too at home, himself, with his own hand, and then fair-copy
them beautifully afterwards.” But he enjoyed these crooked answers which
she used to make. And though, from sheer veneration of him, she never
understood a single one of the jokes which he was always making about
himself (for she gainsaid him when he satirically depreciated himself, and
agreed with him completely if he ironically lauded himself), yet these
mental provincialisms of hers pleased him not a little. She would use such
words as “fleuch” for “fliehe,” “reuch” and “kreuch” for “riehe” and

“kriehe;” religious antiquities out of Luther’s Bible, which were valuable
and enjoyable contributions to her stock of idiosyncracies, and to the
happiness of his honeymoon. One day when he took a particularly pretty
cap which she had tried on with much satisfaction to each of her three cap-
blocks, one after another (she would often gently kiss these cap-blocks),
and putting it on her own little head before the looking-glass, said, “See
how it looks on your own head; perhaps that’s as good a block as the
others,” she laughed with immense delight, and said, “Now, you are always
flattering one!”
Believe me, this naive failure of hers to see his joke so touched him that
he made a secret vow never to make another of the kind, except in private
to himself. But there was a greater honeymoon pleasure still. This was that,
when there came a fast day, Lenette would on no account allow him to kiss
her, when she came into the room (ready for church), her white and red
bloom of youth shining out with threefold beauty from under her black lace
head-dress, and the dark leafage of her dress.
“Worldly thoughts of that kind,” she said, “weren’t at all proper before
service, when people had on their fast-day things; people must wait!”
“By heaven!” said Siebenkæs to himself, “may I stick a soup spoon five
inches long and three broad through my lower lip, like a North American
squaw, and go about with it there, if ever I begin spooning and kissing the
pious soul again, when she has a black dress on, and the bells are ringing.”
And though he wasn’t much of a churchgoer himself, he kept his word. See
how we men behave in matrimonial life, young ladies!
From all which it will readily appear how perfectly happy the advocate
was during his honeymoon, when Lenette, in the most delightful manner,
did all those things for him which he used previously to have to do for
himself in a most miserable fashion and against the grain, making by
unwearied sweepings and brushings his dithyrambic chartreuse as clean and
level and smooth as a billiard-table. Whole honey-trees full of cakes did she
plant during the honeymoon; humming round him of a morning like a busy
bee, carrying wax into her little hive (while he was going quietly on with
his law-papers, building away at his juridical wasp’s nest), forming her
cells, cleaning them out, ejecting foreign bodies, and mending chinks; he
now and then looking out of his wasp’s nest at the pretty little figure in the
tidiest of household dresses, at sight of which he would take his pen in his

mouth, hold his hand out to her across the ink-bottle, and say, “Only wait
till the afternoon comes and you’re sitting sewing—then, as I walk up and
down, I shall pay you with kisses to your heart’s content.” But that none of
my fair readers may be unhappy about the souring of the honey of this
moon which the conduct of that disinheriting blackguard Blaise might bring
about, let me just ask one question? Hadn’t Siebenkæs a whole silver mine
and a coining mill, in the shape of seven law suits all going on, full of veins
of rich ore? And hadn’t Leibgeber sent him a military treasury chest on four
wheels of fortune, containing two spectacle dollars of Julius Duke of
Brunswig, a Russian triple-dollar of 1679, a tail or queue ducat—a gnat or
wasp dollar—five vicariat ducats, and a heap of Ephraimites? For he might
melt down and volatilise this collection of coins without a moment’s
hesitation, inasmuch as his friend had only pocketed them by way of a jest
on the people who pay a hundred dollars for one. They two had all things
corporeal and mental in common to an extent comprehensible by few. They
had arrived at that point where there is no distinction visible between the
giver and the receiver of a benefit, and they stepped across the chasms of
life bound together, as the crystal-seekers in the Alps tie themselves to each
other to prevent their falling into the ice clefts.
One Lady Day, towards evening, however, he hit upon an idea which will
quite reassure all fair readers of his history who may be in a state of anxiety
about him, and which made him happier than the receipt of the biggest
basket of bread with little baskets of fruit in it would have done—or a
hamper of wine. He had felt sure all along that he would hit upon an idea.
Whenever he was in a difficulty of any kind, he always used to say, “Now, I
wonder what I shall hit upon this time; for I shall hit upon something or
other as sure as there are four chambers in my brain.” The delightful idea in
question was, that he should do what I am doing at this moment—write a
book; only his was to be a satirical one.[22] A torrent of blood rushed
through the opened sluices of his heart, right in amongst the wheels and
mill-machinery of his ideas, and the whole of the mental mechanism rattled,
whirred, and jingled in a moment—a peck or two of material for the book
was ground on the spot.
I know of no greater mental tumult—hardly of any sweeter—which can
arise in a young man’s being, than that which he experiences when he is
walking up and down his room, and forming the daring resolution that he
will take a book of blank paper and make it into a manuscript; indeed it is a

point which might be argued whether Winckelmann, or Hannibal the great
general, strode up and down their rooms at a greater pace when they
respectively formed the (equally daring) resolution that they would go to
Rome. Siebenkæs, having made up his mind to write a ‘Selection from the
Devil’s Papers,’ was forced to run out of the house, and three times round
the market-place, just to fix his fluttering, rushing ideas into their proper
grooves again by the process of tiring his legs. He came back wearied by
the glow within him—looked to see if there was enough white paper in the
house for his manuscript—and running up to his Lenette, who was
tranquilly working away at a cap, gave her a kiss before she could well take
the needle out of her mouth—last thorn upon the rose-tree! During the kiss
she quietly gave a finishing stitch to the border of the cap (squinting down
at it the best way she could without moving her head).
“Rejoice with me!” he cried, “come and dance about with me! to-morrow
I’m going to begin a work, a book! Roast the calf’s head to-night, though it
be a breach of our ten commandments.” For he and she, on the Wednesday
before, had formed themselves into a committee on food regulations, and,
of the Thirty-nine articles of domestic economy, which had then been
passed and subscribed to, one was that, Brahminlike, they were to do
without meat at supper.
But he had the greatest difficulty in getting her to understand how it was
that he made out that he would be able to procure her another calf’s head
with a single sheet of the ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers,’ and that he
was perfectly justified in issuing a dispensation from that evening’s fast; for
like the common herd of mankind, or like the printers, Lenette thought that
a written book was paid for at the same rate as a printed one, and that the
compositor got rather more than the author. She had never in her life had
the slightest idea of the enormous sums which authors are paid nowadays;
she was like Racine’s wife, who did not know what a line of poetry or a
tragedy was, although she kept house upon them. For my part, however, I
should never lead to the altar, or into my home as my wife, any woman who
wasn’t capable of at least completing any sentence which death should
knock me over with his hour-glass in the middle of,—or who wouldn’t be
unspeakably delighted when I read to her learned Göttingen gazettes, or
universal German magazines, in which I was bepraised, more than I
deserved perhaps.

The rapture of authorship had set all Siebenkæs’s blood-globules into
such a flow, and all his ideas into such a whirlwind this whole evening that,
in the condition of vividness of fueling and fancy in which he was (a
condition which in him often assumed the appearance of temper), he would
instantly have flown out and exploded like so much fulminating gold at
everything of a slow moving kind which he came across—such as the
servant girl’s heavy dawdling step, or the species of dropsy with which her
utterance was afflicted;—but that he at once laid hold on a precious sedative
powder for the over-excitement caused by happiness, and took a dose of it.
It is easier to communicate an impetus and a rapid flow to the slow-gliding
blood of a heavy, sorrowful heart, than to moderate and restrain the billowy,
surging, foaming current which rushes through the veins in happiness; but
he could always calm himself, even in the wildest joy, by the thought of the
inexhaustible Hand which bestowed it, and that gentle tenderness of heart
wherewith our eyes are drooped to earth as we remember the invisible,
eternal Benefactor of all hearts. At such a time the heart, softened by
thankfulness and by joyful tears, will speak its gratitude by at least being
kindlier towards all mankind, if in no other way. That fierce, untamed
delight, which is what Nemesis avenges, can best be kept within due
bounds by this sense of gratitude; and those who have died of joy would
either not have died at all, or would have died of a better and lovelier joy, if
their hearts had first been softened by a grateful heavenward gaze.
His first and best thanksgiving for the new, smooth, beautiful banks,
between which his life-stream had now been led, took the form of a zealous
and careful drawing up of a defence which he had to prepare in the case of a
girl charged with child-murder, to save her from torture on the rack. The
state-physician of the borough had condemned her to the “trial by the
lungs,” a neither more nor less suitable punishment than the “trial by water”
(which used to be inflicted on witches).
Calm spring-days of matrimony, peaceful and undisturbed, laid down
their carpet of flowers for the feet of these two to tread upon. Only there
sometimes appeared under the window, when Lenette was stretching herself
and her white arm out of a morning, and slowly accomplishing the fastening
back of the outside shutters, a gentleman in flesh-coloured silk.
“I really feel quite ashamed to stretch,” she said; “there’s a gentleman
always standing in the street, and he takes off his hat, and notes one down

just as if he were the meat appraiser.”
The Schulrath Stiefel kept, on the school Saturday holidays, the solemn
promise he had made on the wedding-day to come and see them often, and
at all events to be sure and come on the Saturdays. I think I shall call him
Peltzstiefel (Furboots) as a pleasing variety for the ear—seeing that the
whole town gave him that name on account of the gray miniver, faced with
hareskin, which he wore on his legs by way of a portable wood-
economising stove. Well, Peltzstiefel, the moment he came in at the door,
fastened joy-flowers together into a nosegay, and stuck them into the
advocate’s button-bole, by appointing him on the spot his collaborateur on
the ‘Kuhschnappel Indicator, Heavenly Messenger, and School Programme
Review’—a work which ought to be better known, so that the works
recommended by it might be so too. This newspaper engagement of
Siebenkæs is a great pleasure to me; it will at any rate bring my hero in
sixpence or so towards a supper now and then. The Schulrath, who was
editor of this paper, had a high sense of the power and responsibility of his
post; but Siebenkæs had now risen to the dignity of an author—the only
being who in his eyes was superior even to a reviewer—for Lenette had told
him on the way to church that her husband was going to have a great thick
book printed. The Schulrath considered the ‘Salzburg Literary Gazette’ of
the period the apocryphal, and the ‘Jena Literary Gazette’ the canonical
scriptures: the single voice of one reviewer was, for his ears, multiplied by
the echo in the critical judgment hall into a thousand voices. His deluded
imagination multiplied the head of one single reviewer into several
Lernæan heads, as it was believed of old that the devil used to surround the
heads of sinners with delusive false heads, that the executioner might miss
his stroke at them.
The fact that a reviewer writes anonymously gives to a single individual’s
opinions the weight and authority they would possess, if arrived at by a
whole council; but then if his name were put at the end, for instance,
“X.Y.Z., Student of Divinity,” instead of “New Universal German Library,”
it would weaken the effect of the divinity student’s learned laying down of
the law to too great an extent. The Schulrath paid court to my hero on
account of his satirical turn; for he himself, a very lamb in common life,
transformed himself into a wehrwolf in a review article; which is frequently
the case with good-tempered men when they write, particularly on
humaniora and such like subjects. As indeed, peaceful shepherd races

(according to Gibbon) are fond of making war, and of beginning it, or just
as the Idyllic painter, Gessner, was himself a biting caricaturist.
And our hero for his part afforded Stiefel a great pleasure this evening, as
well as holding out to him the prospect of many more such, when he took
from Leibgeber’s collection of coins a gnat or wasp dollar, and gave it to
him, not as a douceur for his appointment to the critical wasp’s nest, but
that he might turn it into small change. The Schulrath who, being himself
the zealous “Silberdiener” (master of the plate and jewels) of a dollar-
cabinet of his own, would have been delighted if money had existed solely
for the sake of cabinets—(meaning, however, numismatic, not political,
cabinets)—sparkled and blushed delighted over the dollar, and declared to
the advocate (who only wanted the absolute value of it, not the coin-
fancier’s price) that he considered this a piece of true friendship. “No,”
answered Siebenkæs, “the only piece of true friendship about the matter is
Leibgeber giving me the dollar.” “But I’ll give you certainly three dollars
for it, if you like to ask it,” said Stiefel. Lenette, delighted at Stiefel’s
delight, and at his kindly feeling, and secretly giving her husband a push as
an admonition not to give way, here struck in with an amount of
determination which astonishes me, “But my husband’s not going to do
anything of the kind, I assure you; a dollar’s a dollar.” “But,” said
Siebenkæs, “I ought rather to ask you only a third of the price, if I’m going
to hand over my coins to you one at a time in this way.” Ye dear souls! If
people’s “yeses” in this world were only always such as your “buts.”
Stiefel, confirmed bachelor though he was, wasn’t going to let himself be
found wanting, on such a delightful occasion as this, at all events, in proper
politeness towards the fair sex, least of all towards a woman whom he had
begun to be so fond of, even when he was bringing her home to be married,
and whom he liked twice as much now that she was the wife of such a dear
friend, and was such a dear friend herself too. He therefore adroitly led her
to join in the conversation (which had previously been too deep and
scholarly for her) by using the three cap-blocks as stepping-stones over to
the journal of fashions; only he slid back again sooner than he might have
done to a more ancient journal of fashions, that of Rubenius on the
‘Costume of the ancient Greeks and Romans.’ He said he should be happy
to lend her his sermons every Sunday, as advocates don’t deal in theology
much. And when she was looking on the floor at her feet for the snuffers
which had fallen, he held the candle down that she might see.

The next Sunday was an important day for the house (or rather rooms) of
Siebenkæs, for it introduced thereto a grander character than any who have
appeared hitherto, namely the Venner (Finance Councillor)—Mr. Everard
Rosa von Meyern, a young member of the aristocracy, who went daily in
and out at Heimlicher von Blaise’s to “learn the routine of official
business;” he was also engaged to be married to a poor niece of the
Heimlicher’s, who was being brought up and educated for his heart in
another part of Germany.
Thus the Venner was a character of consequence in the borough of
Kuhschnappel as well as in our ‘Thorn-piece,’ and this in every political
point of view. In a corporeal point of view he was much less so. His body
was stuck through his flowered garments much like a piece of stick through
a village nosegay; under the shining wing-covers of his waistcoat (in itself a
perfect animal-picture)[23] there pulsated a thorax, perpendicular, if not
absolutely concave, and his legs had, all told, about the same amount of calf
as those wooden ones which stocking-makers put into their windows as an
advertisement.
The Venner gave the advocate to understand, in a cold and politely rude
manner, that he had merely come to relieve him from the task of defending
the case of child-murder, as he had so much to attend to besides. But
Siebenkæs saw through this pretence with great ease. It was a well-known
circumstance that the girl accused of this crime had adopted as the father of
her child (now flown, away above this earth) a certain commercial traveller,
whose name neither she nor the documents connected with her case could
mention; but that the real father—who, like a young author, was bashful
about putting his name to his pièce fugitive—was no other than the
emaciated Venner, Everard Rosa von Meyern himself. There are certain
things which a whole town will determine and make up its mind to ignore;
and one of these was Rosa’s authorship. Heimlicher von Blaise knew that
Siebenkæs was aware of it, however, and feared that he might, out of
revenge for the affair of the inheritance, purposely make a poor defence of
the girl, that the shame and disgrace of her end might fall upon his relative,
Meyern’s shoulders. What a terrible, mean suspicion!
And yet the purest minds are sometimes driven to entertain such
suspicions. Fortunately Siebenkæs had already got the poor mother’s
lightning-conductor all ready forged and set up. When he showed it to this

false bridegroom of the supposed child-murderess, the latter immediately
declared that she could not have found an abler guardian saint among all the
advocates in the town; to which author and reader can both add “nor one
who should be actuated by worthier motives,” as we know he did it as a
thank-offering to Heaven for the first idea of the ‘Devil’s Papers.’
At this juncture, the advocate’s wife came suddenly back from the
adjoining bookbinder’s room, where she had been paying a flying visit. The
Venner sprang to meet her at the threshold with a degree of politeness
which couldn’t have been carried further, inasmuch as she had to open the
door before he could reach her. He took her hand, which, in her respect and
awe of him, she half permitted, and kissed it stooping, but twisted his eyes
up to her face, and said:
“Meddem! I have had this beautiful hand in mine for several days.”
It now appeared, from what he said, that he was the identical flesh-
coloured gentleman who had stolen her hand with his drawing-pen when
she had had it out of the window; because he had been anxious to get a
pretty Dolce’s hand for a three-quarter portrait of the young lady he was
engaged to, and hadn’t known what to do; her head he was doing from
memory. He then took off his gloves, in which alone he had dared as yet to
touch her (as many of the early Christians used only to touch the Eucharist
in gloves from reverence therefor), displaying the fires of his rings and the
snow of his skin. To preserve the whiteness of the latter from the sun, he
hardly ever took his gloves off, except in winter when the sun has scarcely
power to burn.
The Kuhschnappel aristocracy, particularly its younger members, give a
willing obedience to the commandment which Christ gave to His apostles,
to “greet no man by the way,” and the Venner observed the required degree
of incivility towards the husband, though not by any means to the wife,
towards whom his condescension was infinite. An inborn characteristic of
Siebenkæs’s satirical disposition was a fault which he had of being too
polite and kindly with the lower classes, and too forward and aggressive
with the upper. He had not as yet sufficient knowledge of the world to
enable him to determine the precise angle at which his back should bend
before the various great ones of the place, wherefore he preferred to go
about bolt upright, though he did so against the promptings of his kind
heart. An additional cause was, that the profession to which he belonged

being of a belligerent nature, has a tendency to embolden those who belong
to it; an advocate has the advantage of never requiring to employ one
himself, and consequently he is often inclined to treat even the grandest
folks with some amount of coolness, unless they happen to be judges or
clients, at the disposal of both of which classes of society his best services
are at all times ready to be placed. Notwithstanding which, it generally
happened that, in Siebenkæs’s kindly feeling to all mankind, his moveable
bridge got shoved down so low under his tightened strings that the notes
given out by them became quite low and soft. On the present occasion,
however, it was much more difficult to be polite to the Venner (whose
designs as regarded Lenette he was compelled to see) than to be rude to
him.
Moreover, he had an inborn detestation for dressy men although—just,
the contrary feeling for dressy women—so that he would often sit and stare
for a long time at the little Fugel-mannikins of dress in the fashion journals,
just to get properly angry at them; and he would assure the
Kuhschnappelers that there was nobody whom he should so delight in
playing practical jokes upon as on such a mannikin—yea, in insulting him,
or even doing him an injury (to the extent of a good cudgelling). Also it had
always been a source of delight to him that Socrates and Cato walked
barefoot about in the market-place; going bareheaded, on the other hand
(chapeau bas), he did not like half so much.
But, ere he could utter himself otherwise than by making faces, the
wooden-head of a Venner stroked his sprouting beard, and in a distant
manner graciously offered himself to the advocate in the capacity of
cardinal protector or mediator in the Blaise inheritance business; this he did,
of course, partly to blind the advocate’s eyes, and partly to impress upon
him how immeasurably inferior was his station. The latter, however,
shuddering at the idea of taking a gnome of this kind for paraclete and
household angel, said to him (but in Latin)—
“In the first place I must insist that my wife shall not hear a syllable
about that insignificant potato quarrel. And moreover, in any legal question
I scorn and despise anybody’s assistance but a legal friend’s, and in this
instance I am my own legal friend. I fill an official position here in
Kuhschnappel; it is true, the official position by no means fills me.” The
latter play upon words he expressed by means of a Latin one, which

displayed such an unusual amount of linguistic ability, that I should almost
like to quote it here. The Venner, however, who could neither construe the
pun nor the rest of the speech with the ease with which we have read it here,
answered at once (so as to escape without exposing his ignorance) in the
same language, “Imo, immo,” which he meant for yes. Firmian then went
on, in German, saying, “Guardian and ward, intimate as their connection
should be, in this case came into contact to an extent almost too great to be
pleasant; although, no doubt, there have been cases before where one cousin
has cozened another:[24] however, the very members of ecclesiastical
councils have come to fisticuffs before now, e. g. at Ephesus in the fifteenth
century. Indeed, the Abbot Barsumas and Dioscurus, Bishop of Alexandria,
men of position, pummelled the good Flavian on that very occasion till he
was as dead as a herring.[25] And this was on a Sunday too, a day on which,
in these absurd old times, a sacred truce was put to quarrels and differences
of every description; though now, Sundays and feast-days are the very days
when the peace is broken; the public-house bells and the tinkling of the
glasses ring the truce out, and people pummel each other, so that the law
gets her finger into the pie. In old days, people multiplied the number of
saints’ days for the sake of stopping fights, but the fact is that everybody
connected with the legal profession, Herr von Meyern (who must have
something to live upon), ought to petition that a peaceable working-day or
two might be abolished now and then, so that the number of rows might be
increased, and with them the fines and the fees in like ratio. Yet who thinks
of such a thing, Venner?”
He was quite safe in spouting the greater part of this before Lenette; she
had long been accustomed to understanding only a half, a fourth, or an
eighth part of what he said; as for the whole Venner, she gave herself no
concern about him. When Meyern had taken his departure with frigid
politeness, Siebenkæs, with the view of helping to advance him in his
wife’s good opinion, extolled his whole and undivided love for the entire
female sex (though engaged to be married), and more particularly his
attachment to that preliminary bride of his, who was now in the condemned
cell of the prison; this, however, rather seemed to have the effect of
lowering him in her good opinion.
“Thou good, kind soul, may you always be as faithful to yourself and to
me!” said he, taking her to his heart. But she didn’t know that she had been

faithful, and said, “to whom should I be unfaithful?”
From this day onwards to Michaelmas Day, which was the day of the
borough fair, fortune seems to have led our pathway, I mean the reader’s
and mine, through no very special flower-beds to speak of, but merely along
the smooth green turf of an English lawn, one would suppose on purpose
that the fair on Michaelmas Day may suddenly arise upon our view as some
shining, dazzling town starts up out of a valley. Very little did occur until
then; at least, my pen, which only considers itself bound to record incidents
of some importance, is not very willing to be troubled to mention that the
Venner Meyern dropped in pretty often at the bookbinder’s (who lived
under the same roof with the Siebenkæses)—he merely came to see whether
the ‘Liaisons Dangereuses’ were bound yet.
But that Michaelmas! Truly the world shall remember it. And in fact the
very eve of it was a time of such a splendid and exquisite quality that we
may venture to give the world some account of it.
Let the world read the account of this eve of preparation at all events,
and then give its vote.
On this eve of the fair all Kuhschnappel (as all other places are at such a
time) was turned into a workhouse and house of industry for women; you
couldn’t have found a woman in the whole town either sitting down, or at
peace, or properly dressed. Girls the most given to reading opened no books
but needle-books to take needles out, and the only leaves they turned over
were paste ones to be put on pies. Scarcely a woman took any dinner; the
Michaelmas cakes and the coming enjoyment of them were the sole
mainspring of the feminine machinery.
On these occasions women may be said to hold their exhibitions of
pictures, the cakes being the altar-pieces. Everyone nibbles at and minutely
inspects these baked escutcheons of her neighbour’s nobility; and each has,
as it were, her cake attached to her, as a medal is, or the lead tickets on
bales of cloth, to indicate her value. They scarcely eat or drink anything, it
is true, thick coffee being their consecrated sacrament wine, and thin
transparent pastry their wafers; only the latter (in their friend’s and hostess’s
houses) tastes best, and is eaten almost with fondness when it has turned out
hard and stony and shot and dagger proof—or is burnt to a cinder—or, in
short, is wretched from some cause or other; they cheerfully acknowledge
all the failures of their dearest friends, and try to comfort them by taking

them to their own houses and treating them to something of a very different
kind.
As for our Lenette, she, my dear lady reader, has always been a baker of
such a sort that male connoisseurs have preferred her crust, and female
connoisseurs her crum, both classes maintaining that no one but she (and
yourself, dearest) could bake anything like either. The kitchen fire was this
salamander’s second element, for the first and native element of this dear
nixie was water. To be scouring with sand, and squattering and splattering
in it, in a great establishment like Siebenkæs’s (who had devoted all
Leibgeber’s Ephraimites to the keeping of this feast), was quite her
vocation. No kiss could be applied to her glowing face on such a day—and
indeed she had her hands pretty full, for at ten o’clock the butcher came
bringing more work with him.
The world will be glad (I’m perfectly certain in my own mind) if I just
give them a very short account of this business—who could have done it
better, for that matter? The facts of it were these: at the beginning of
summer the four fellow lodgers had clubbed together and bought a cow in
poor condition which they had then put up to fatten. The bookbinder, the
cobbler, the poor’s advocate and the hairdresser—between whom and his
tenants there was this distinction, that they owed their rent to him, whereas
he owed his to his creditors—caused to be prepaid and drawn up by a
skilful hand (which was attached to the arm of Siebenkæs) an authentic
instrument (here KOLBE the word-purist will snarl at poor innocent me in
his usual manner for employing foreign words in a document based on the
Roman law) relative to the life and death of the cow; in which instrument
the four contracting parties aforesaid—who all stood attentively round the
document, he who was sitting and drawing it excepted—bound and engaged
themselves in manner following, that is to say, that—
1stly. Each of the four parties interested, as aforesaid, in the said cow
might and should have the privilege of milking her alternately.
2ndly. That this Cooking or Fattening Society might and should defray
from a common treasury chest the price of said cow, the cost of the carriage
of implements and provisions, and maintenance generally of the same; and
3rdly. That the allied powers as aforesaid should not only on the day
before Michaelmas, the 28th September, 1785, slaughter the said cow, but
further that each quarter of the same should then and there be further

divided into four quarters, conformably to the lex agraria, for partition
among the said parties to the said contract.
Siebenkæs prepared four certified copies of this treaty, one for each; he
never wrote anything with graver pleasure. All that now remained to be
performed of the contract by the house association of our four evangelists,
who had collectively adopted as their armorial crest or emblematic animal,
one single joint-stock beast, namely, the female of that of Saint Luke—was
the third article of it.
However, I know the learned classes are panting for my fair, so I shall
only dash down a hurried sketch of my Man-and-Animal piece (Kolbe of
course goes on taking me to task).
That Septembriseur, the butcher, did his part of the business well, though
it was at the close of Fructidor—the four messmates looking on throughout
the operation, as also did old Sabine, who did a good deal, and got
something for it. The quadruple alliance regaled itself on the slain animal at
a general picnic, to which each contributed something in order that the
butcher might be included gratis; and it is undeniable that one member of
the league, whom I shall name hereafter, attended this picnic in a frame of
mind and in a costume barely serious enough for the occasion. The
slaughter confederation then set to working its division sum, according to
the number of its members, and the golden calf round which their dance
was executed was cut, up with the appropriate heraldic cuts. Then the whole
thing was over. I think I can say nothing more laudatory of the manner in
which the whole process of zootomic division was carried out than what
Siebenkæs, an interested party, said himself, viz., “It’s to be wished that the
twelve tribes of Israel, as well as, in later times, the Roman empire, had
been divided into as many and as fair divisions as our cow and Poland have
been.”
I shall be doing ample justice to the cow’s embonpoint if I merely
mention that Fecht the cobbler uttered a panegyric which commenced with
the most lively and vigorous oaths, and the statement that she was an
(adjective) bag of skin and bones, and ended with an assurance, uttered in
mild and pious accents that Heaven had indeed favoured the poor beast, and
“blessed us unworthy sinners above measure.” A frolicsome cult by nature,
he had had the heavy coach-harness of pietism put on to him, and was
consequently obliged to keep softening down the “strong language” which

came naturally to him into the pious sighs appropriate to his “converted
state.” And it was to the frame of mind and the costume of this very FECHT
that I made allusion above as being barely suitable to the occasion, for I’m
sorry to say he had no breeches on him the whole day of this great
slaughter, but ran up and down the slaughter-house in a white frieze frock
of his wife’s, having a strange general effect of looking something like his
own better half. However, the members of the association didn’t take any
offence; he couldn’t help it, because while he was going about got up in this
Amazon’s demi-negligée, and presenting this hermaphrodite appearance, his
own black-leather leg-cases were in the dye pot, being prepared for a
reissue.
The poor’s advocate had begged Lenette (about a quarter past four in the
afternoon) not to go on working herself to death, and never to mind
bothering about any supper, as he was going to be miserly for once, save
himself a supper tonight, and sup upon eighteen penn’orth of pastry: but the
busy soul kept running about brushing and sweeping, and by six o’clock
they were both lying resting in the leather arms of—a big easy chair (for he
had no flesh and she no bones), and looking around them with that
expression of tranquil happiness which you may see in children while
eating, at the room in its state of mathematical order, at the way in which
everything in it was shining, at the pastry new-moon-crescents in their
hands, and at the liquid burnished gold (or rather foilgold[26]) of the setting
sun creeping up and up upon the gleaming tin dishes. There they rested and
reposed like cradled children, with the screeching, clattering, twelve
herculean labours of the rest of the people of the house going on all round
them; and the clearness of the sky and the newly cleaned windows added a
full half-hour to the length of the day; the bell-hammer, or tuning-hammer
of the curfew bell gently let down the pitch of their melodious wishes till
they lapsed into dreams.
At ten o’clock they woke up and went to bed...!
I quite enjoy this little starry night picture myself; though my head has
reflected it all glimmery and out of focus, as the gilt hemisphere of my
watch does the evening sun when I hold it up to it. Evening is the time
when we weary, hunted men long to be at rest; it is for the evening of the
day, for the evening of the year (autumn), and for the evening of life, that
we lay up our hard-earned harvests, and with such eager hopes! But hast

thou never seen in fields, when the crops were gathered, an image and
emblem of thyself—I mean the autumn daisy, the flower of harvest; she
delays her blossom till the summer is past and gone, the winter snows cover
her before her fruit appears, and it is not till the—coming spring that that
fruit is ripe!
But see how the roaring, dashing surges of the fair-day morning come
beating upon our hero’s bedposts! He comes into the white, shining room,
which Lenette had stolen out of bed like a thief before midnight to wash
while he was in his first sleep, and had sanded all over like an Arabia; in
which manner she had her own way while he had his. On a fair-day
morning I recommend everybody to open the window and lean out, as
Siebenkæs did, to watch the rapid erection and hiring of the wooden booths
in the market-place, and the falling of the first drops of the coming deluge
of people, only let the reader observe that it wasn’t by my advice that my
hero, in the very arrogance of his wealth (for there were samples of every
kind of pastry which the house contained on a table behind him), called
down to many of the little green aristocratic caterpillars whom he saw
moving along in the street with even greater arrogance than his own, and
whose natural history he felt inclined to learn by a look at their faces.
“I say, sir, will you just be good enough to look at that house, that one
there—do you notice anything particular?”
If the caterpillar lifted up its physiognomy, he could peruse and study it
at his ease,—which was of course his object.
“You don’t notice anything particular?” he would ask.
When the insect shook its head, he concurred with it, and did the same up
at the window, saying:
“No, of course not! I’ve been looking at it for the last twelve months
myself, and can’t see anything particular about it; but I didn’t choose to
believe my own eyes.”
Giddypated Firmian! Your seething foam of pleasure may soon drop
down and disappear—as it did that Saturday when the cards were left. As
yet, however, his little drop of must which he has squeezed out of the
forenoon hours was foaming and sparkling briskly. The landlord moved at a
gallop, casting (with his powder-sowing machine) seed into a fruitful soil.
The bookbinder conveyed his goods (consisting partly of empty manuscript
books, partly of still emptier song books, partly of “novelties,” in almanacs)

to the fair by land-carriage in a wheelbarrow, which he had to make two
journeys with in going, but only one in returning in the evening, because
then he had got rid of his almanacs to purchasers and to sellers (almanacs
are the greatest of all novelties, or pieces of news—for there is nothing in
all the long course of time so new as the new year). Old Sabel had set up
her East India house, her fruit garner, and her cabinet of tin rings at the
town gate; she wouldn’t have let that warehouse of hers go to her own
brother at a lower figure than half-a-sovereign. The cobbler put a stitch in
no shoe on this St. Michael’s Day except his wife’s.
Suck away, my hero, at your nice bit of raffinade sugar of life, and empty
your forenoon sweetstuff spoon, not troubling your head about the devil and
his grandmother, although the pair of them should be thinking (after the
nature of them) about getting a bitter potion, even a poison cup, made ready
and handing it to you.
But his greatest enjoyment is still to come, to wit, the numberless beggar
people. I will describe this enjoyment, and so distribute it.
A fair is the high mass which the beggars of all ranks and classes attend;
when it is still a day or two off, all the footsoles that have nothing to walk
upon but compassionate hearts, are converging towards the spot like so
many radii, but on the morning of the fair-day itself the whole annual
congress of beggardom and the column of cripples are fairly on the march.
Anyone who has seen Fŭrth, or been in Elwangen during P. Gassner’s
government, may cut these few leaves out of his copy; but no one else has
any idea of it till I proceed and lead him in at the town-gate of
Kuhschnappel.
The street choral service and the vocal serenades now commence. The
blind sing like blinded singing-birds—better, but louder; the lame walk; the
poor preach the gospel themselves; the deaf and dumb make a terrible
noise, and ring in the feast with little bells—everybody sings his own tune
in the middle of everybody else’s—a paternoster is clattering at the door of
every house, and in the rooms inside nobody can hear himself swear. Whole
cabinets of small coppers are lavished on one hand, pocketed on the other.
The one-legged soldiery spice their ejaculatory prayers with curses, and
blaspheme horribly, because people don’t give them enough—in brief, the
borough which had made up its mind for a day’s enjoyment, is invaded and
almost taken by storm by the rabble of beggars.

And now the maimed and the diseased begin to appear. Whoever has a
wooden jury-leg under him, sets it and his long third leg and fellow-
labourer the crutch, in motion towards Kuhschnappel, and drives and plants
his sharp-pointed timber toe into moist earth there in the vicinity of the
town-gate, in hopes of its thriving and bearing fruit. Whosoever has no arms
or hands left, stretches both out for an alms. Those to whom Heaven has
entrusted the beggars’ talent, disease, above all paralysis, the beggars’
vapeurs—trades with his talent, and the body appertaining to it, levying
contributions with it on the whole and the sound. People who might stand
as frontispieces to works on surgery and medicine, quite as appropriately as
at city gates, take up their position near the latter and announce what they
lack, which is, first and foremost, other people’s cash. There are plenty of
legs, noses, and arms in Kuhschnappel, but a great many more people.
There is one most extraordinary fellow—(to be admired at a distance,
though impossible to be equalled—looked upon with envy, though indeed
only by such blotting-paper souls as can never see supreme excellence
without longing to possess it); there’s only half of him there, because the
other half’s in his grave already, everything you could call legs having been
shot clean away; and these shots have placed him in a position at once to
arrogate and assume to himself the primacy and generalship-in-chief of the
cripples, and be drawn about on a triumphal car as a kind of demigod,
whose soul, in place of a corporeal garment, has on merely a sort of cape
and short doublet. “A soldier,” said Siebenkæs, “who is still afflicted with
one leg, and who on that ground expostulates with fate, inquiring of her,
‘Why am I not shot to pieces like that cripple, so that I might make as much
in the day as he does?’ seems to forget that on the other side of the question
there are thousands of other warriors besides himself who haven’t even one
wooden leg (let alone more), but are totally unprovided with even that fire-
and begging-certificate; moreover, that however many of his limbs he might
have been relieved of by bullets, he might still keep on asking, ‘Why not
more?’”
Siebenkæs was merry over the poor because they are merry over
themselves; and he never would kick up a politico-economical row about
their occasionally tippling and guzzling a little too much,—when, for
instance, a whole lazarette-wagon, or ambulance-load of them, halting at
some shepherd’s hut, they get down, and go in, and their plasters, their
martyrs’ crowns, their spiked girdles and hair-shirts come off, leaving

nothing but a brisk human being who has left off sighing just for a minute;
or—since what everybody works for is, not merely to live, but to live a little
better now and then—when the beggar too has something a little better than
his everyday fare, and when the cripple pulls the goddess of joy into his
boarded dancing-barn to dance with him as his partner, and her hot mask
falls off in the waltz (as for our ball-rooms, it never falls off in them).
About 11 o’clock, the devil, as I have half hinted already, dropped a
handful of blue-bottle flies into Firmian’s wedding soup—to wit, Herr Rosa
von Meyern, who graciously intimated his aristocratic intention of coming
to call that afternoon, “because there was such a good view of the market-
place.” People of impecunious gentility, who can’t issue orders in any
houses but their own, construct in their own, with much ease, loopholes
whence they can fire upon the enemy who makes his attack from—within.
The advocate had a piece of rudeness towards the Venner to put into either
scale of his balance of justice, so as to determine which was the least of the
two. The one was, to let him be told he might stay where he was; the other,
to let him in, and then behave just as though the noodle were up in the
moon. Siebenkæs chose the latter as the smaller.
Women, good souls, have always to carry and hold up the Jacob’s ladder
by which the male sex mount into the blue æther and into the evening-red;
this call of the Venner came as an extra freight loaded on to Lenette’s two
burden-poles of arms. The laving of all moveable property, and the
aspersion of all immoveable, recommenced. Meyern, the false lover of the
poor child-murderess, Lenette detested with all her heart; at the same time,
all her polishing machinery was at once set agoing on the room, indeed, I
think women dress themselves more and with greater pains for their lady-
enemies than for their lady-friends.
The advocate went up and down, all behung with long chains of
ratiocination, like a ghost, and would fain have succeeded in imbuing her
with the idea that she shouldn’t give herself the slightest bother of any kind
about the nincompoop. “It was no good,” she said, “what would he think of
me?” It was not until having eliminated from the room as a piece of crudity
his old ink-bottle, into which he had only that minute put ink-powder to
dissolve and make ink for the ‘Selection from the Devil’s Papers,’ she was
about to lay hands on that holy ark, his writing-table—that the head of the

house ramped up—on his hind legs, pointing with his fore paw to the line of
demarcation.
Rosa appeared! Nobody who had just a little soft place in his heart could
really have cursed this youngster, or beaten him into a jelly; one rather got
to feel a kind of a liking for him, between his pranks. He had white hair on
his head and on his chin, and was soft all over; and had stuff like milk
instead of blood in his veins, like the insects, just as poisonous plants have
generally white milky juice. He was of a very forgiving nature, especially
towards women, and often shed more tears himself in an evening at the
theatre than he had caused many whom he had ruined to let fall. His heart
was really not made of stone, or lapis infernalis, and if he prayed for a
certain time, he grew pious during the process and sought out the most
time-honoured of religious formularies to give in his adhesion to them then
and there. Thunder was to him a watchman’s rattle, arousing him from the
sleep of sin. He loved to take the needy by the hand, especially if the hand
was pretty. All things considered, he may perhaps get to heaven sooner or
later; for, like many debtors in the upper circles of society, he doesn’t pay
his play-debts, and he also has in his heart an inborn duel-prohibition
against shooting and hacking. As yet he is not a man of his word; and if he
were poorer, he would steal without a moment’s hesitation. Like a lap-dog,
he lies down wagging his tail at the feet of people of any importance, but
tugs women by the skirts, or shows his teeth and snarls at them.
Pliant water-weeds of this sort fall away from the very slightest satiric
touch, and you can’t manage to hit them with one, richly as they deserve it,
because its effect is only proportionate to the resistance it meets with.
Siebenkæs would have been better pleased had Von Meyern only been a
little rougher and coarser, for it is just these yielding, pitiful, sapless,
powerless sort of creatures that filch away good fortune, hard cash,
feminine honour, good appointments and fair names, and are exactly like
the ratsbane or arsenic, which, when it is good and pure, must be quite
white, shining and transparent.
Rosa appeared, I have said, but oh! lovely to behold beyond expression!
His handkerchief was a great Molucca of perfume; his two side locks were
two small ones. On his waistcoat he had a complete animal kingdom
painted (as the fashion of the day was), or Zimmermann’s Zoological Atlas.
His little breeches and his little coat, and every thing about him salted the

women of the house into Lottish salt-pillars, merely in passing them by on
his way upstairs, I must, say, though, that what dazzle me personally, are the
rings which emboss six of his fingers,—there were profile portraits,
landscapes, stones, even beetle-wing covers all employed in this gold-
shoeing of his fingers.
We may quite properly apply to the human hand the expression “it was
shod with rings like a horse’s hoof,” it has been long applied to the horse’s
hoof itself, and Daubenton has proved, by dissections, that the latter
contains all the different parts of the human hand. The use of these hand or
finger manacles is quite proper and permissible; indeed rings are
indispensable to the fingers of those who ought by rights to have them in
their noses. According to the received opinion, these metal spavins, or
excrescences of the fingers, were only invented to make pretty hands ugly,
as a kind of chain and nose-rings to keep vanity in check; so that fists which
are ugly by nature can easily dispense with these disfigurements. I should
like to know whether there is anything in another idea of mine bearing on
this subject. It is this. Pascal used to wear a great iron ring with sharp spines
on it round his naked body, that he might always be ready to punish himself
for any vain thought which might occur to him by giving this ring a slight
pressure; now is it not perhaps the case that these smaller and prettier rings
in a similar way chastise any vain thoughts which may occur, by slightly,
but frequently hurting? They seem at least to be worn with some such
object, for it is exactly the people who suffer most from vanity who wear
the greatest quantities of them, and move about their beringed hands the
most.
Unwished-for visits often pass off better than others; on this occasion
everyone got on pretty comfortably. Siebenkæs of course was in his own
house—and behaved himself accordingly. He and the Venner looked out of
the window at the people in the market-place. Lenette, in accordance with
her upbringing, and the manners and customs of the middle classes of small
towns, didn’t venture to be otherwise than silent, or at the most to take an
exceedingly subordinate, obligato, accompanying part in the concert of a
conversation between men; she fetched and carried in and out, and, in fact,
sat most of the time down stairs with the other women. It was in vain that
the courteous, gallant Rosa Everard, tried upon her his wonted wizard spells
to root women to a given spot. To her husband he complained that there was
little real refinement in Kuhschnappel, and not one single amateur theatre

where one could act, as there was in Ulm. He had to order his new books
and latest fashions from abroad.
Siebenkæs in return expressed to him merely his enjoyment over the—
beggars in the market-place. He made him notice the little boys blowing red
wooden trumpets, loud enough to burst the drum of the ear, if not to
overthrow the walls of Jericho. But he added, with proper thoughtfulness,
that he shouldn’t omit to notice those other poor devils who were collecting
the waste bits of split wood in their caps for fuel. He asked him if, like other
members of the chamber, he disapproved of lotteries and lotto, and whether
he thought it was very bad for the Kuhschnappel common people’s morals
that they should be crowding about an old cask turned upside down, with an
index fixed to the bottom of it which revolved round a dial formed of
gingerbread and nuts, and where the shareholders, for a small stake, carried
off from the banker of the establishment, a greedy old harridan of a woman,
a nut or a ginger cake. Siebenkæs took pleasure in the little, because in his
eyes it was a satirical, caricaturing diminishing mirror of everything in the
shape of burgherly pomposity. The Venner saw no entertainment whatever
in double-meaning allusions of the kind; but indeed the advocate never
dreamt of amusing anybody but himself with them. “I may surely speak out
whatever I like to myself,” he once said; “what is it to me if people choose
to listen behind my back, or before my face either?”
At length he went down among the people in the market-place, not
without the full concurrence of the Venner, who expected at last to be able
to have some rational conversation with the wife. Now that Firmian was
gone, Everard begun to feel in his element, swimming in his own native
pike-pond as it were. As an introductory move he constructed for Lenette a
model of her native town; he knew a good many streets and people in
Augspurg, and had often ridden through the Fuggery, and it seemed only
yesterday, he said, that he saw her there working at a lady’s hat, beside a
nice old lady, her mother he should think. He took her right hand in his (in
an incidental manner), she allowing him to do so out of gratefulness for
calling up such pleasant memories; he pressed it—then suddenly let it go to
see if she mightn’t just have returned the pressure the least bit in the world,
in the confusion of fingers as it were—or should try to recover the lost
pressure. But he might as well have pressed Götz von Berlichingen’s iron
hand with his thievish thumb as her warm one. He next came upon the
subject of her millinery work, and talked about cap and bonnet fashions like

a man who knew what he was talking about; whereas when Siebenkæs
mixed himself up with these questions, he displayed no real knowledge of
the subject at all. He promised her two consignments, of patterns from Ulm,
and of customers from Kuhschnappel. “I know several ladies who must do
what I ask them,” he said, and showed her the list of his engagements for
the coming winter balls in his pocket-book; “I shan’t dance with them if
they don’t give you an order.” “I hope it won’t come to that,” said Lenette
(with many meanings). Finally, he was obliged to ask her to let him see her
at work for a little, his object here being to weaken the enemy by effecting a
diversion of her forces—her eyes being occupied with her needle, she could
only have her ears at liberty to observe him with. She blushed as she took
two bodkins and stuck one of them into the round red little pincushion of—
her mouth; this was more than he could really allow, it was so very
dangerous—it formed a hedge against himself—and she might swallow
either the stiletto in question, or at all events some of the poisonous
verdigris off it. So he drew this lethal weapon with his own hand out of its
sheath in her lips, scratching the cherry mouth a little, or not at all—as he
loudly lamented—in the process, however. A venner of the right sort
considers himself liable in a case of this kind for the fees and expenses
consequent upon the accident; Everard, in his liberality, took out his English
patent pomade, smeared some on to her left forefinger, and applied the
salve to the invisible wound with the finger as a spatula—in doing which he
was obliged to take hold of her whole hand as the handle of the spatula, and
frequently squeeze it unconsciously. He stuck the unfortunate stiletto itself
into his shirt front, giving her his own breastpin instead, and exposing his
own tender white breast to—the cold. I particularly beg persons who have
had experience in this description of service to give their opinion with firm
impartiality on my hero’s conduct, and, sitting in court martial on him, to
point out such of his movements and dispositions as they may consider to
have been ill-advised.
Now that she was wounded, poor thing, he wouldn’t let her go on
working, but only show him her finished productions. He ordered a copy of
one of them for Madame von Blaise. He begged her to put it on and let him
see it on her—and he set it himself just as Madame von Blaise would wear
it. By heaven! it was better even than he had thought; he swore it would suit
Madame von Blaise quite as well, as she was just the same height as
Lenette. This was all stuff and nonsense, really the one was taller by quite

half a nose than the other. Lenette said so herself, she had seen Madame
von Blaise at church. Rosa stuck to his own opinion, and swore by his soul
and salvation (for in cases of the kind he was given to profane language),
and by the sacrament, that he had measured himself with her a hundred
times, and that she was half-an-inch taller than himself. “By heaven!” he
said, suddenly jumping up, “of course I carry her measure about with me,
like her tailor; all that need be done is that you and I measure ourselves
together.”
I shall not here withhold from little girls a golden rule of war made by
myself, “Don’t argue long with a man, whatever it may be about—warmth
is always warmth, even if it only be warmth of argument—one forgets one’s
self, and ultimately takes to proving by syllogistic figures, and this is just
what the enemy wants—he converts these figures into poetical figures—
ultimately even into plastic figures.”
Lenette, a little giddy with the rapid whirl of events, good naturedly
stood up to serve as recruit measure for her recruit Rosa; he leant his back
to hers. “This won’t do,” he said, “I can’t see,” and unlocked his fingers
which had been intertwined together, backwards, over the region of her
heart. He turned quickly round, stood before her, and embraced her gently,
so as to determine, by comparing the levels of their eyes, whether their
brows were an exact height or not. His were glaring quite an inch higher up
than hers; he clasped her closely and said, turning red, “you see you were
right; but my mistake was that I added your beauty to your height,” and in
this proximity he pressed his mouth, red as sealing-wax, upon her lips, very
founts and sources of truth as they were.
She was ashamed, annoyed and embarrassed, angry, and ready to cry, but
had not the courage to let her indignation break out upon a gentleman of
quality. She didn’t speak another word then. He set her and himself at the
window, and said he would read her some songs, of rather a different kind,
he hoped, to those which were being hawked down in the street. For he was
one of the greatest poets in Kuhschnappel, although as yet it was not so
much that his verses had made him known, as that he had made his verses
known. His poems, like so many others nowadays, were like the muses
themselves, children of memory. Every old Frankish town has at least its
one fashionable fop, a person who fait les honneurs; and every town,
however old, prosaic, imperial-judicature-endowed, possesses its genius, its

poet, and sentimentalist; often both these offices are filled by the same
individual—as was the case in Kuhschnappel. The greater and likewise the
lesser house of assembly looked upon Rosa as a mighty genius, smitten
with the genius-epidemic-fever. This disease is something like
elephantiasis, of which Troil in his travels in Iceland gives such an accurate
description in twenty-four letters, and the principal features of which are
that the patient is exactly like an elephant as to hair, cracks, colour, and
lumps of the skin, but has not the power of the elephant, and lives in a cold
climate.
Everard took a touching elegy out of one of his pockets, the left one, in
which (I mean in the elegy) a noble gentleman, lovesick, sang himself to
death; and he told her he should like to read it to her, if his feelings would
let him get through it without breaking down. However, the poem shortly
drew more than one tear and emotion from its owner, and he, to his honour,
was constrained to furnish a fresh proof of the fact that however manly and
cold he and poets of his stamp can be to the heaviest sorrows of humanity,
they really cannot quite contain themselves at the woes of love, but are
compelled to weep at them. Meanwhile Rosa, who, like swindlers at play,
always kept one eye upon a reflecting surface of some sort—water, window
panes, or polished steel for instance, so as to catch a passing glimpse of the
female countenance from time to time—saw by means of a little mirror in
one of the rings of his left hand, in which hand he was holding the elegy,
just a trace or two in Lenette’s eyes of the tragic dew left there by his poem.
So he pulled out of his second pocket a ballad (it is, no doubt, printed long
ago) in which an innocent child murderess, with a tearful adieu to her lover,
throws herself upon a sword. This ballad (very unlike his other poetical
children) had real poetic merit, for luckily (for the poem at least) he was a
lover of that kind himself, so that he could speak from the heart to the heart.
It is not easy to portray the emotion and the melting pitying tears on
Lenette’s face; all her heart rose to her tear-dimmed eyes.
It was an experience utterly new to her to be thus agitated by a
combination of truth and fiction.
The Venner threw the ballad into the fire, and himself into Lenette’s
arms, and cried—
“Oh! you sympathising, noble, holy creature!”

I cannot paint the amazement with which, completely unprepared for and
incomprehensive of this transition from crying to kissing, she shoved him
away. This made little impression on him; he was on his high horse and said
he must have some souvenir of this “sacred entrancing moment”—only a
little lock of her hair. Her humble station, his high-flown language, and the
fact that she was perfectly unable to form the slightest idea what use her
hair would be to him, even supposing she gave enough to stuff a pillow—all
this put into her head the foolish idea that he wanted it to perform some
magical rite with, such as putting her under a love spell, or something of the
sort.
He might have stabbed himself there and then before her, hewn himself
in pieces, impaled himself alive, she wouldn’t have interfered; she might
indeed have shed her blood to save him, but not a single hair of her head.
He had still one resource in petto—he had really never met with such a
case as this before; he lifted up his hand and vowed that he would get Herr
von Blaise to recognise her husband as his nephew, and pay over his
inheritance—and that with the greatest ease, because he would threaten to
jilt his niece unless he did it—if she would just take the scissors and cut off
a little hair memorial, no bigger even than the fourth part of a moustache.
She knew nothing about the business of the inheritance, and he was
consequently obliged, to the great detriment of his enthusiastic state, to give
a prosaic, detailed account of the species facti of the whole of that law suit.
By great good fortune he had still in his pocket the number of the ‘Gazette’
in which the inheritance chamber’s inquiry as to the advocate’s existence
appeared in print, and he was able to put it into her hands. And now this
plundered wife began to cry bitterly, not for the loss of the money, but
because her husband had told her nothing about it all this time, and still
more because she couldn’t quite make out what her own name really was,
or whether she was married to a Siebenkæs or to a Leibgeber. Her tears
flowed faster and faster, and in her passion of grief she would have let the
deceiver before her have all the pretty hair on her head, had not an
accidental circumstance burst the whole chain of events, just as he was
kneeling and imploring her for one little lock.
But we must first look after her husband a little, and see how he is getting
on, and whither he bends his steps. At first among the market stalls; for the
many-throated roaring, and the Olla Podrida of cheap pleasures, and the

displayed pattern cards of all the rags out of, and upon, which we human
clothes moths construct our covering cases and our abodes—all these
caused his mind to sink deep into a sea of humoristic-melancholy
reflections concerning this mosaic picture of a life of ours, made up as it is
of so many little bits, many-tinted moments, motes, atoms, drops, dust,
vapours. He laughed, and listened, with an emotion incomprehensible by
many of my readers, to a ballad singer, bawling, with his rhapsodist’s staff
in his right hand pointed at a big, staring picture of a horrible murder, and
his left full of smaller, printed pictures, for sale, in which the misdeed and
the perpetrator of it were displayed to the German public in no brighter
colours than those of poetry. Siebenkæs bought two copies, and put them in
his pocket, to read in the evening.
This tragic murder picture evoked in the background of his fancy that of
the poor girl he had defended, and the gallows, on to which fell those
burning tears which had flowed from his wounded heart—that heart which
nobody on earth, save one, understood—when last it had been lacerated. He
left the noisy market-place, and sought all-peaceful nature, and that
isolatorium, destined alike for friendship and for guilt, the gallows. When
we pass from the stormy uproar of a fair into the still expanse of wide
creation, entering into the dim aisles of nature’s hushed cathedral, the
strange sudden calm, is to the soul as the caressing touch of some beloved
hand.
With a sad heart he climbed up to the well-known spot, whose ugly name
I shall omit, and from these ruins he gazed around upon creation, as if he
were the last of living beings. Neither in the blue sky, nor upon the wide
earth, was there voice or sound; nothing but one forlorn cricket, chirping in
monosyllables, among the bare furrows, where the harvest had been cleared
away. The troops of birds flocking together with discordant cries flew to the
green nets spread upon the ground—and not to meet the green spring far
away. Above the meadows, where all the flowers were withered and dead,
above the fields, where the corn ears waved no more, floated dim phantom
forms, all pale and wan, faint pictures of the past. Over the grand eternal
woods and hills a biting mist was draped in clinging folds, as if all nature,
trembling into dust, must vanish in its wreaths. But one bright thought
pierced these dark fogs of nature and the soul, turning them to a white
gleaming mist, a dew all glittering with rainbow colours, and gently lighting
upon flowers. He turned his face to the north-east, to the hills which lay

between him and his other heart, and up from behind them rose, like an
early moon in harvest, a pale image of his friend. The spring, when he
should go to him and see him once more, was at work already preparing for
him a fair broad pathway thither, all rich with grass and flowers. Ah! how
we play with the world about us, so quickly dressing it all with the webs
which our own spirits spin.
The cloudless sky seemed sinking closer to the dusky earth, bright with a
softer blue. And though a whole long winter lay between, the music of the
coming spring already came, faint and distant, to his ear; it was there in the
evening chime of the cattle bells down in the meadows, in the birds’ wild
wood notes in the groves, and in the free streams flowing fast away amid
the flowery tapestries that were yet to be.
A palpitating chrysalis was hanging near him still in her half-shrivelled
caterpillar’s case, sleeping away the time till the flower cups all should
open; phantasy, that eye of the soul, saw beyond and over the sheaves of
autumn the glories of a night in June; every autumn-tinted tree seemed
blooming once again; their bright coloured crests, like magnified tulips,
painted the autumn mist with rainbow dyes; light breezes of early May
seemed chasing each other through the fresh, fluttering leaves; they
breathed upon our friend, and buoyed him up, and rose with him on high,
and held him up above the harvest and above the hills, till he could see
beyond these hills and lands—and lo! the springs of all his life to come,
lying as yet enfolded in the bud, lay spread before his sight like gardens
side by side—and there, in every spring time, stood his friend.
He left the place, but wandered a long while about the meadows, where
at this time of year there was no need to hunt carefully for footpaths—
chiefly that his eyes might not betray where his thoughts had been to all the
market people who were to be met. It was of little use—for in certain
moods the torn and wounded heart, like injured trees, bleeds on and on, and
at the slightest touch.
He shunned eye-witnesses, such as Rosa above all, for this reason, that he
was (I am sorry to have to say it) in just one of those moods when, whether
from modesty or from vividness of feeling, he was most disposed to mask
his emotion under the semblance of temper. At last a weapon of victory
came to his hand, the thought that he had to apologize and make amends to
his guest for so long and so uncourteous an absence.

When he got home what a strange state of matters! The old guest gone—
another there in his place—and near the latter his wife in tears. When he
came into the room, Lenette went to one of the windows, and a fresh torrent
of tears fell down. “Madame Siebenkæs,” said the Schulrath, continuing his
address to her, and keeping hold of her hand, “submit yourself to the will of
God, I beseech you; nothing has happened but what can be put to rights
without difficulty. I am willing to concede you a sorrow of the heart—but it
must be a restrained and a subdued one.”
Lenette looked out of the window, not at her husband.
The Schulrath related, in the first place, all that I have already given my
account of (Firmian, listening to him and looking at him, took the glowing
hand of Lenette, whose face was still averted), and then continued—
“When I came in, merciful Heavens, there was his lordship on his knees
before Madame Siebenkæs, with carnal tears, and—I am constrained to
have the gravest suspicions—a design upon her precious honour! However,
I raised him up, without the least ceremony, and I said to him, with the
boldness of St. Paul himself—for which I am ready to answer before God
and man—‘Your Lordship, are these the doctrines which I inculcated into
your Lordship when I was your private tutor; is it Christian conduct to go
down upon your knees in such a manner? Fie, for shame, Herr von Meyern.
Fie, for shame, Herr von Meyern!’”
Here the Schulrath got into a terrible heat again, and strode up and down
the room with his hands in the pockets of his plush coat.
Firmian said, “It’s a simple matter to set up a scarecrow and plant a
hedge to keep off a hare like him; but what ails you, love,” he said, “and
what are you crying so bitterly about?”
She cried more bitterly than ever; when the Schulrath planted his hands
on his sides, and said to her in much wrath, “Very well, Madame
Siebenkæs, this is the way of it, is it? This is all the impression my good
counsel and comforting words have made upon your mind, is it? I never
should have believed it of you!
“It was all for nothing then (as I am constrained to conclude) that, when I
had the honour of bringing you here from Augspurg in my carriage, I
described to you with all the eloquence at my command, the blessedness of
the married state, before you had had an opportunity of learning it by
experience; it seems I might just as well have spoken to the winds of

heaven. Can it really be the case that all that I said to you in the carriage
simply went in at one ear and out at the other? when I told you how happy a
wife was in and through her husband, how she often could hardly help
crying for joy at possessing him—how these two had but one heart and one
flesh, and shared everything between them, joy and sorrow, every morsel of
food, every wish and desire, ay and the very smallest secrets. Well, well,
Madame Siebenkæs, I see the Schulrath may keep his breath to cool his
porridge.”
Upon this she twice wiped and dried her eyes hurriedly, constrained
herself to look at him very kindly indeed, and with a forced appearance of
being quite pleased again, and said with a deep sigh, but softly and not in a
tone of pain, “Oh dear me!”
The Schulrath touched her hand as it hung down with his finger tips in a
priestly manner, and said—
“But may the Lord be your physician and helper in all your necessities”
(he could hardly say more, for his tears were coming), “Amen,—which is,
being interpreted, ‘Yea, verily, so mote it be.’” Here he embraced and
kissed the husband, and this with much warmth, saying, “Send for me, if
your wife can obtain no consolation—and may God give you both strength.
O, by the by—the very thing I came here about—the review of the Easter
programme must be ready by Wednesday—and I am in your debt for the
eight lines or more you did about that piece of rubbish the other day, which
you gave such a capital dressing to.”
When he had gone, however, Lenette didn’t seem so thoroughly consoled
as might have been expected: she leant at the window sunk in deep,
hopeless, amazement and reflection. It was in vain that Firmian pointed out
that of course he wasn’t going to change his and her present name any
more, and that her honour, marriage, and love didn’t depend upon a
wretched name or so up or down, but upon himself and his heart. She
restrained her tears, but she continued to be troubled and silent the whole of
the evening.
Now let no one call our good Firmian over jealous or suspicious when,
having just got well rid of one wretched sacrilegious robber of marriage
honour, the Venner, the idea of a volcanic eruption which might throw
stones and ashes all over a great tract of his life suddenly occurs to him;
what if his friend Stiefel should be really (as it almost seems) falling in love

with his wife, in all innocence, himself. His whole behaviour from the very
beginning—his attentions on the wedding-day, his constant visits, and even
his exasperation with the Venner that very day, and his warm feeling and
sympathy on the occasion altogether, all these were the separate parts of a
pretty coherent whole, and seemed to indicate a deep and growing affection,
thoroughly honourable, no doubt, and unperceived by himself. Whether or
not a spark of it had jumped off into Lenette’s heart, and was smouldering
there, it was impossible as yet to determine; but true and good as he knew
his wife and his friend to be, his hopes and his fears could not but be pretty
equally balanced.
Dear hero! Do continue to be one! Destiny, as I see more and more
clearly as time goes on, seems to have made up her mind gradually to join
the separate pieces of a drill machine together with which to pierce through
the diamond of thy stoicism; or else by slow degrees to build and fashion
English scraping and singeing machines (made out of poverty, household
worries, law suits, and jealousy) to scrape and singe away from thee every
rough and ill-placed fibre, as if you were a web of finest English cloth. If
this should be so, do but come out of the mill as splendid a piece of English
stuff as was ever brought to the Leipzig cloth and book fair, and you will be
glorious indeed.

CHAPTER IV.

A MATRIMONIAL PARTIE À LA GUERRE—LETTER TO THAT HAIR
COLLECTOR, THE VENNER—SELF-DECEPTIONS—ADAM’S
MARRIAGE SERMON—SHADOWING AND OVER-
SHADOWING.
There is nothing which I observe and note down with more scrupulous
and copious accuracy than two equinoctial periods, the matrimonial
equinox when, after the honeymoon, the sun enters the constellation Libra
(or the balance), and the meteorologic vernal equinox; because, by
observing the weather which prevails at these two periods, I am enabled to
prognosticate with surprising accuracy the nature of that which will
characterise the succeeding season. I consider the first storm of the spring to
be always the most important, and similarly, the first matrimonial storm; the
others all come from the same quarter.
When the Schulrath was gone, the poor’s advocate took his sulky house-
goddess into his arms, and plied her with every conceivable method of
proof; with proofs derived from immemorial hearsay, partial proofs,
evidential proof, proof on oath, and by logical deduction—every kind of
proof wherewith one can harden one’s own heart, or soften another’s.
But the whole of the evidence he adduced was useless. He might just as
well have been embracing the cold hard angel at the baptismal font in the
principal church, his own angel remained quite as cold and silent. Furboots
had been the tourniquet which stopped the hemorrhage of Lenette’s open,
streaming artery; but his departure had taken the German tinder stopping
from her eyes and now they streamed unstanched.
Siebenkæs went often to the window, and up and down in the room, that
she might not see that he was following her example, and that her sorrow,
little reasonable as it was, infected him by sympathy. We can more easily
bear, and forgive pain of our own causing than of another’s. All the

following day there was an unendurable silence in the house. This was the
very first of the beds of the matrimonial nursery-garden in which a seed of
the apple of discord had been planted, and as yet not the faintest rustle of its
sap was audible. It is not in the first domestic squabble, not till the fourth,
tenth, ten-thousandth, that a woman can keep perfect silence with her
tongue, yet make a tremendous noise with her body, and turn every chair
which she shoves about, and every reel of cotton which she lets fall, into a
language-machine and fountain of speech, and play her instrumental music
all the louder, because her vocal parts are counting their rests. Lenette
Wendeline moved everything and said everything, as softly as if her
liege lord had the gout and was lying with cramped foot pressed in agony
against the trembling bottom board of his bed.
When the third day of this came on, he was vexed and annoyed—and he
had reason. I beg to say that, for my own part, I should be quite prepared to
quarrel with my own wife, if I had one—ay, and to do it with a will—and
that to some purpose, and to bandy words with her, as well as letters
(though I should prefer the former). But there’s one thing which would kill
me outright, and that would be her keeping up a long, dreary, tearful
sulking, a thing which, like the sirocco wind, ends by blowing out all a
man’s lights, thoughts, and joys, and at length his life itself. Just as we all of
us, rather like a violent thunderstorm in summer, and think it refreshing
rather than otherwise in itself—and yet consider it a cursed nuisance on the
whole, because it’s sure to be followed by some days of dreary wet weather.
Siebenkæs was all the more vexed on this occasion, because he was a man
who scarcely ever was vexed. As other jurists have reckoned themselves
among men exempt from torture, so Siebenkæs had long ago fortified
himself against grief and care, those torture racks of the soul (by the help of
Epictetus), as effectually as he had the infanticide against bodily torture.
The Jews hold that when Messiah comes, hell will be joined on to
paradise, so as to make a bigger dancing saloon. And all the year long,
Siebenkæs occupied himself in building and adding on his torture chambers
and schools of suffering to the entertainment halls of his bagatelle, so as to
have more room to perform his ballets.
He often said a medal should be struck for any citizen who should be
three hundred and sixty-five days, five hours, forty-eight minutes and fifty-

five seconds, without either growling or snarling.
He wouldn’t have got that medal himself in the year 1785. On the third
day, the Saturday, he was so wild at his wife’s speechlessness, that he was
wilder still with that kill-joy of an Everard. For, of course, that minnesinger,
might come in again at any moment, bringing in his company the goddess
of discord (who, as directrix and ambassadress, performs such important
poetical functions in Voltaire’s Henriade), and introducing her into the
homely “Volkslied” of an advocate, by way of a dea ex machina to unloose
the matrimonial knot, and tie a fresh one with the Venner. Siebenkæs
accordingly wrote him the following academic-controversial document.
“May it please your Lordship,
“I take the liberty to lay before your Lordship in this little memorial my
humble petition,
“That you will be pleased to stay at home, and spare me the honour of
your visits.
“Should your Lordship find it necessary to become possessed of a certain
quantity of my wife’s hair—the undersigned hereby undertakes to cut and
deliver the same himself. In the event of your Lordship’s being minded to
exercise a jus compascui, or right of free common and pasturage in my
premises, and appearing therein in person, I shall embrace with much
pleasure the opportunity then afforded me of plucking as many of your
Lordship’s own hairs as may be requisite to constitute a souvenir out of
your Lordship’s head, by the roots, like monthly radishes, with my own
hands. While I was in Nürnberg, I used often to go and dine in the
neighbouring villages (against the will of the authorities) with a fine old
Prugel Knecht,[27] i. e. with a private tutor, who had towzed out and
excerpted from the heads of three little slips of nobility, while he was giving
them their lessons, enough silky hair to make him a handsome mouse-
coloured bag-wig, which the man most probably wears to this day. His
motive in thus applying himself to the production of silk, or rather, his
reason for divesting these little heads of their exterior foliage, was, that his
own beams might the more effectually ripen the fruit within, as, for similar
reasons, it is usual to remove leaves from the vines in August.

“I have the honour to remain, &c.”

I shall be very sorry if I cannot manage to get the reader to understand
that the advocate wrote this biting letter without the slightest bitterness of
feeling. He had read the brilliant satirical writings of the three merry wise
men of London, Butler, Swift, and Sterne—those three bodies of the
satirical giant, Geryon, or three furies (Parcæ) of the foolish—to such an
extent that, as their disciple and follower, he never thought whether it was a
biting letter or not. In his admiration of the artistic beauties of his
composition, he lost sight of its meaning; and indeed, if a stinging speech
were made to himself, he would think nothing of the length of its prickles in
comparison with its form and shape. I need merely instance his ‘Selection
from the Devil’s Papers;’ the satirical poison bubbles and venomous
prickles so frequent in that work came from his pen and ink—i. e. his head
only, not from his heart.
I take the opportunity of begging the reader always to infuse the very
soul of gentleness and kindness into every word and tone he utters (because
it is our words more than our deeds which make people angry), and, more
particularly still, into every page he writes. For, truly, even if your
correspondents have forgiven you an epistolary pereat long ago, yet the old
leaven of ill-will ferments anew, if the sorrel-leaf of a letter containing it
chances to come to hand again. We may, of course, on the other hand,
reckon upon a similar immortality for a piece of epistolary kindness. Truly,
though a long, cutting December wind had made my heart stiff and
immoveable to everything in the shape of kindly feeling for one who, once
on a time, used to write me absolute Epistles of St. John, tender pastorals of
letters, what would it matter, if I should but chance to turn up these old
letters in my letter-treasury of bundles and packets of letters?
The sight of the beloved handwriting, the welcome seal, the kind,
endearing words, and the pieces of paper where so many a pleasure found
space to sport and play, would cast the sunshine of the old affection upon
the frozen heart once more; it would reopen at the memory of the dear old
time, as some flower that has closed reopens when a sunbeam lights upon it,
and its only thought—ay, were it but the day before yesterday that it had
conceived itself mortally offended—would be, “Ah! I was too hard upon
him (or her) after all.” Many of the saints in the first century used to drive
devils out of the possessed, in a somewhat similar way, merely by means of
letters.

Furboots came, as if he had been sent for, on the Saturday evening, like a
Jewish Sabbath. I have often seen a guest serve as cement or hefting
powder to two better halves in a state of fracture, because shame and
necessity compelled them to speak and behave kindly to each other, at all
events while the guest was there. Every husband should be provided with
two or three visitors of this sort, to come in when he’s suffering from an
attack of wife-possessed-too-long-with-the-devil-of-dumbness; as long as
the people are there, at all events, she must speak, and take the iron thief-
apple of silence—which grows on the same stalk as the apple of discord—
out of her mouth.
The Schulrath stood up before Lenette Wendeline as if she were one of
his school girls, and asked her if she had borne this first cross of her
married life patiently, and like a worthy sister in suffering of the patriarch
Job. She drooped her big eyes, wound a thread the length of a finger into a
white snowball, and breathed deeper. Her husband answered for her: “I was
her brother in affliction, and bore the cross-bar of the burden—I without a
murmur, she without a murmur. In the twelfth century, the heap of ashes on
which Job endured his sufferings used still to be shown. Our two chairs are
our heaps of ashes; there they are still to be seen!”
“Good woman!” said Stiefel, in the softest pianissimo of his pedal reed-
stop of a masculine voice, and laid his snow-white hand on the soft, raven
hair upon her forehead. Siebenkæs heard a multiplying sympathetic echo of
these words in his heart, and laid his arm on Lenette’s shoulders, who was
blushing with pleasure at the honour conferred upon her by this kindness of
the man in office. Her husband softly pressed her left side to his right, and
said:—
“She is good, indeed; she is gentle, and quiet, and patient, and only too
industrious. If the whole tag, rag and bobtail of Hell’s army, in the shape of
the Venner, had only not advanced upon our little summer-house of
happiness, to knock its roof off, we should have lived happy in it for many a
day, Mr. Stiefel, far into the winter of our lives. For my Lenette is good, and
too good for me and for many another man.” Here Stiefel, in his emotion,
surrounded that hand of hers which had the skein of thread in it, at the seat
of the pulse with his fine fingers—the empty hand being in her husband’s
possession—and the Wound Water of our pain, the great drops of which
trickled from her drooped eyes down her cheeks, where her imprisoned

hands could not wipe them away, made the two male hearts very tender.
And besides, her husband could never praise any one long without his eyes
overflowing. He went on, faster, “Yes, she might have been very
comfortable and well-off with me, but that my mother’s money is kept back
from me in this terrible way. But, even for all that, I should have made her
happy without the money, and she me—we never had a word, never a single
unhappy moment—now had we, Lenette? nothing but peace and love, till
the Venner came. He has taken a good deal from us!”
The Schulrath raised his clenched fist in wrath, and exclaimed, sawing
the air with it, “You child of hell! you robber-captain and filibuster! You
silken Catiline and mischief-maker! Does it ever strike you that you’ll have
to answer for this and your other pranks one day? Mr. Siebenkæs, this, at all
events, I do expect of you, that if ever he comes here again asking for hair,
you will turn him out by the hair of his own head, or hit this fur-maggot (as
you call him yourself) across the shoulders with a boot-jack, and squeeze
his hand with a pair of pincers—in fact, the long and the short of it is, I will
not have him come here any more.”
And here Siebenkæs, to cool down his own emotions and other people’s,
mentioned the fact of his having already taken steps in the matter, and
served the necessary letter of inhibition upon the Venner. Stiefel clucked his
tongue in a joyful manner, and nodded his head approvingly. He considered
any person high in office to be a vicegerent of Christ on earth, a count to be
a demigod, and an emperor as a whole one;—but a single one of the deadly
sins committed by any of them all would at once cost them the whole of his
deferential good will,—and a slip in Latin grammar, though committed by a
head crowned with gold, he would at once have done battle with in a whole
Latin Easter programme. Men of “the world have straight bodies and
crooked souls; scholars often have neither the one nor the other. The last of
Lenette’s clouds cleared away when she heard that a paper escarpment and
cheval de frise against the Venner had been constructed at her door. “Then
he will trouble me no more! Thanks be to Heaven! He goes about lying and
deceiving everyone he comes across.”[28]
“We don’t employ these words, Madame Siebenkæs, if we care to speak
grammatically,” said Stiefel; “irregular verbs such as ‘kriechen, trügen,
lügen,’ though they are verba anomala, and as such have ‘kroch, log, trog,’
and so on in the imperfect tense, are still always inflected quite regularly in

the present by the best German grammarians—although the poets permit
themselves a poetical license in such cases, as, I am sorry to say, they do in
most others—and therefore we say, if we care to be grammatically correct,
‘lügt, trügt, kriecht,’ &c., at the present day, that is.”
“Don’t find fault with my dear Augspurger’s Lutheran inflections,” said
Siebenkæs; “there’s something touching to me about these irregular verbs
of hers; they are the Schmalkaldian article of the Augspurg confession.”
Here she drew her husband’s ear softly down to her lips and said, “What
would you like me to get for supper? Tell the gentleman that you know I
mean no offence, whatever words I use. And I wish you would ask his
reverence, Firmian dear, when I’m out of the room, whether our marriage is
really all right according to the Bible.” He asked this question on the spot.
Stiefel answered it deliberately as follows:—“We have only to look at the
case of Leah, who was conducted to Jacob’s tent under the pseudonym of
Rachel on her marriage night, and whose marriage the Bible holds to be
perfectly valid. Is it names or bodies that exchange rings? And can a name
fulfil the marriage vow?”
Lenette answered these questions, and spoke her thanks for this
consistorial decision by a bashful glance of restored content and a beaming
face upturned towards him. She went to the kitchen, but kept constantly
coming back and snuffing the candle, which was on the table at which the
two gentlemen sat talking; and probably nobody, except the advocate and I,
will consider this to be any indication of a more than ordinary liking for
Stiefel. The latter always took the snuffers from her, saying “it was his
duty.” Siebenkæs clearly perceived that both the apples of his eyes
revolved, satellite-fashion, round his own planet, Lenette; but he did not
grudge the Latin knight his little glimpse of an age of chivalry thus
sweetened by a Dulcinea; like most men, he could far sooner pardon the
rival lover than the unfaithful fair; women, on the other hand, hate the rival
more than the unfaithful lover. Moreover, he knew perfectly that Stiefel had
not the least idea himself whom or what he cared for or sighed for, and that
he was a far better hand at reviewing schoolmen and authors than himself.
For instance, his own anger he called professional zeal; his pride, the
dignity due to his office; his passions, sins of weakness; and on this
occasion love appeared to him disguised as mere philanthropy. The arch of
Lenette’s troth was firmly finished off in the keystone of religion, and the

Venner’s assault upon it had not shaken this sacred masonry in the slightest
degree.
At this juncture the postman stumped up stairs with a new constellation
which he set in their serene family sky, namely, the following letter from
Leibgeber.

“Bayreuth, 21 Sept., 1785.

“My dear Brother, Cousin, and Uncle,
Father and Son!
“For the two auricles and the two ventricles of thy heart constitute my
entire genealogical tree:—as Adam, when he went for a walk, carried about
with him the whole of his blood relations that were to be, and his long line
of descendants—which is not wholly unreeled and wound up even at this
day—till he became a father, and his wife bare a child. I wish to goodness I
had been the first Adam! Siebenkæs, I do adjure you, let me, let me, follow
up this idea which has struck me and taken hold of me with such power; let
me not write a word in this letter that does not add a touch to the three-
quarter-length portrait which I shall draw of myself as the first father of
mankind!
“Men of learning are much mistaken who suppose my reason for wishing
I were Adam to be, that Puffendorf and many other writers very properly
award me the whole of this earth as a kind of European colony in the India
of the universe, as my patrimonium Petri, Pauli, Judæ and the rest of the
Apostles; inasmuch as I, being the sole Adam and man, and consequently
the first and last of universal monarchs (although as yet without any
subjects), might of course lay claim to the entire earth. It might occur to the
pope, indeed (he being holy father, though not our first father), to make a
similar claim, or rather it did occur to him some centuries ago, when he
constituted himself the guardian and the heir of all the countries of the
earth, and indeed made bold to set two other crowns on the top of his
earthly one, a crown of heaven and a crown of hell.
“How small a thing it is that I desire! All that I wish I had been the old
Adam (in fact, the oldest Adam) for, is merely that I might have strolled up
and down with Eve among the espaliers of Eden on our marriage night, in

our aprons and beasts’ skins, and delivered an address in Hebrew to the
mother of all living.
“Before commencing my address I beg to observe that, while I was yet
unfallen, it fortunately occurred to me to note down the more important
heads of my universal knowledge. For I had, in my condition of innocence,
a perfect and intuitive knowledge of all the sciences, of history, both
universal and literary, the various criminal and other codes of law, all the
dead languages as well as the living, and was a kind of live Pindus and
Pegasus, a portable Lodge of Light and learned society, a pocket university,
and miniature golden Siècle de Louis XIV. Considering what my mental
powers were at that juncture it is a miracle (and what’s more, a very lucky
job) that in my leisure moments I put down the cream of my universal
knowledge on paper, because when I subsequently fell, and became simple
and ignorant, I had these excerpts, or Catalogues raisonnés, of my former
wisdom by me, so that I could refer to them.
“‘Virgin!’ (it was thus that the sermon delivered outside Paradise
commenced) ‘it is true we are the first of parents, and are minded to
originate all the subsequent parents; though all that you think about is
sticking your spoon into a forbidden apple. However, I, being a man and
protoplast, reflect and ponder, and as we walk to and fro, I shall undertake
the office of preacher of the sermon on this, the occasion of our entering
into the bonds of wedlock (not having as yet, unfortunately, begotten
anybody else to do it), and, in a brief wedding exhortation, direct your
attention to the doubts affecting and the reasons deciding, the protoplasts, or
the first parents and first of wedded couples (that is to say, you and me), in
the act of reflecting and considering, and how—
“‘In the first place, they consider the reasons why they should not people
the earth, but emigrate this very day, the one into the old world, the other
into the new; and
“‘In the second place, the reasons why they should do nothing of the
kind, but marry.
“‘After which a short elench, or usus epanorthoticus, will be adduced,
and will conclude the lecture and the night.’

IN THE FIRST PLACE

“‘My dearly beloved!
“‘Here, in my sheepskin, as I appear before you, grave, thoughtful, and
wise, it is nevertheless the fact that I am full to the very brim of—not so
much follies as fools, with a good many wise men stuck in here and there
between them by way of parentheses. I am of short stature, it is true, and the
ocean[29] came a good deal above my ancles, and besprinkled my new
beasts’ skin; and yet, as I walk up and down here, I am girt about with a
seed cloth, containing the seeds of all nations, and carrying the repertory of
the whole human race, an entire world in miniature and orbis pictus, round
my middle like a pedlar’s stock in trade. For Bonnet, who is in me
among the rest, will sit down at his desk (when he comes out), and prove
that they are all one inside the other, like a nest of boxes or a set of
parentheses, that the father contains the son, that the grandfather contains
them both, the great-grandfather consequently the grandfather and all the
contents of him, the great-great-grandfather the great-grandfather and the
contents of his contents and all his episodes, all sitting waiting one inside
the other. Are there not then here embodied in thy bridegroom—this is a
point, dear bride, which cannot be made too intelligible to you—all
religious sects, excepting the Preadamites, but including the Adamites,[30]
and all giants, the great Christopher himself among them every individual
of every nation of all the earth—all the shiploads of negroes destined for
America, and the packets marked with red containing the soldiers promised
by England to Anspach and Bayreuth? Eve, am I not, as I stand here before
you, a whole Jews’-quarter—a Louvre of all the crowned heads of the earth
—since I can bring them all into existence if I please, and if I am not
induced by this first head of my discourse to refrain from doing so? You
will admire me, and yet laugh at me at the same time if you but look at me
well, lay your hand on my shoulder, and say to yourself: “Now, in this man
and protoplast are contained all mankind, all the learned faculties, all
schools of philosophy, and of sewing and spinning, cheek by jowl in peace
and harmony, the highest and noblest royal families and princely houses
(though not yet sorted out from among the common ship’s company), all
free imperial orders of knighthood, packed higgledy-piggledy with their
vassals, cottiers, and tenants, it is true—monasteries and nunneries next
door to each other—barracks and members of Parliament, to say nothing of
cathedral chapters, with all their provosts, deans, priors, sub-priors, and

canons! What a man! What an Anak!” you will add. You are right, dear, I
am indeed—the very nest dollar of the human coin-cabinet, the universal
court of assembly of all judicatures, with all the members of all assemblies,
not one out of its place, the walking corpus juris of all civil, canon,
criminal, feudal, and municipal law. Haven’t I Meusel’s ‘Learned Germany’
and Jöcher’s ‘Scholastic Lexicon’ within me all complete, and Jöcher and
Meusel themselves, to say nothing of their supplementary volumes? I wish I
could just let you see Cain—who, if head second of this discourse should
determine me, would be our first offshoot and sucker, our Prince of Wales,
Calabria, Asturias and the Brazils. You would see, if he were transparent—
as I believe him to be—how he contains all the rest, one inside the other,
like beer glasses—all œcumenical councils, inquisitions, and propaganda,
and the devil and his grandmother. But, loveliest, thou didst not write down
any of thy scientia media before thy fall, as I did, and consequently thou
starest into the future as blind as a bat. I, however, who see into it quite
clearly, am enabled by my chrestomathy to perceive that, where other men
beget perhaps some ten fools, I shall beget whole millions of tens, and units
into the bargain, seeing that the Bohemians, Parisians, Viennese, Leipzigers,
Bayreuthers, Hofians, Dublinese, Kuhschnappelers (and their wives and
daughters over and above) have all got to come into existence through me,
and that in every million of them there will always be at least five hundred
who neither have, nor will listen to, reason. Duenna, as yet you know little
of the human race, but two in fact, for the serpent is not one; but I know
what sort of race I am going to produce, and that in opening my limbus
infantum, I open at the same time a Bedlam. By heaven, I weep and lament
when I merely peep in between the leaves of the centuries in their long
course, and see nothing there but gouts of gore, and a congeries of idiots—
when I think of the trouble and pain to be undergone before a century shall
learn to write a legible hand, a hand even as good as a minister’s or an
elephant’s trunk—before poor humanity gets through its dame’s school, and
private tutors, and French governesses, so as to be fit for Latin grammar
schools, public schools, Jesuit seminaries, and next for fencing classes,
dancing classes, dogmatic and clinical courses. By old Harry, I feel hot.
Nobody will think of you as the brood-hen of the coming flock of starlings,
as the spawning codfish in whom Leuwenhack will count 9½ millions of
eggs; not you, my little Eve, but your husband, will get all the blame, who
should have known better, and rather begotten nothing than such a rabble of

thieves and robbers, crowned emperors on the Roman throne, and
vicegerents on the Roman chair, the former of whom will call themselves
after Antoninus and Cæsar, the latter after Christus and Petrus, and among
whom there are men whose thrones shall be Lüneburg torture chairs for the
human race, if not the converse of a Place de Grève, where the masses shall
be put to death, and the single individual feted and amused.[31] And I shall
be taken to task on account of Borgia, Pizarro, St. Dominic, and Potemkin.
Even supposing I should manage to evade being blamed for black
exceptions such as these, I should be obliged to admit that my descendants
really cannot get through the space of half-an-hour without either thinking
or doing something foolish, that the war of giants, waged in them by their
passions, is never broken by a peace, seldom even by a truce; that the
greatest of all man’s faults is that he has such a number of little ones; that
his conscience serves for scarcely anything but hating his neighbours and
being morbidly sensitive to their transgressions; that he never leaves off
evil ways till he is on his deathbed; that, he learns and loves the language of
virtue, but is at enmity with the virtuous—just as the English employ
French language teachers, though they detest the French themselves. Eve,
Eve, we shall have little to congratulate ourselves upon if we marry; Adam
means in the original “red earth,” and truly my cheeks will consist entirely
thereof, and will blush scarlet at the mere thought of the indescribable and
unparalleled conceit and vanity of our great-grandchildren, increasing as the
centuries go on. Nobody will tweak himself by the nose—unless perhaps
when he is shaving. Critics will set themselves up above authors, authors
above critics—Heimlicher von Blaise will give his hand to be kissed by
orphans; ladies theirs to be kissed by all and sundry; mighty ones the
embroidered hems of their garments. Eve, I had only got as far on with my
prophetic extracts from the world’s history as the sixth century, when you
bit the apple under the tree, and I, like a fool, did as you did, and everything
slipped out of my head: God only knows what sort of a set the fools and
foolesses of the subsequent centuries may turn out to be. Virgin, wilt thou
now put into action thy Sternocleidomastoideum, as Sömmering styles the
muscle which nods the head, and so express your “yes” when I put to you
the question, “Wilt thou have the marriage-preacher to thy wedded
husband?”
“‘You will no doubt reply, let us first hear the second head of the
discourse, in which the subject is considered from another point of view.

And indeed, dearly beloved, we had almost forgotten that we must proceed
to the

SECOND PLACE,
and consider the reasons which may persuade first parents to become such,
and to marry, and serve Destiny in the capacity of sewing and spinning
machines of linseed, hemp, flax, and tow, to be wound by her in endless
networks and coils around the earthly sphere. My strongest reason, and, I
trust, yours also, is the thought of the Day of Judgment. For, in the event of
our becoming the entrepreneurs of the human race, I shall see all my
descendants, when they ascend from the calcined earth like vapour, at the
last day, into the nearest planet, and fall into order for the last review; and
among this harvest of children and grandchildren, I shall hit upon a few
sensible people with whom one may be able to exchange a rational word or
two—men whose whole lives were passed, as well as lost, amid thunder
and lightning (as according to the Romans those whom the gods loved were
killed by lightning), and who never closed their eyes or their ears, however
wild the storm. I see the four heathen evangelists among them too, Socrates,
Cato, Epictetus, and Antoninus, men who went through the world, using
their voices like fire-engine pipes, two hundred feet long, to save people
from being burnt out of house and home by the fire of their own passions,
sluicing them all over with pure, cold, Alp-water. And there can be no doubt
after all, that I may really be the arch-papa, and you the arch-mamma, of
some very great and celebrated people, that’s to say, if we choose. I tell you,
Eve, that I have it here in black and white among my excerpts and
collectanea that I shall be the forefather, ancestor, and Bethlehem of an
Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, Rousseau, Goethe, Kant, Leibnitz,
people, take them for all in all, who are as able thinkers as their protoplast
himself, if not abler. Eve, thou active and important member of the fruit-
bearing jointstock company, or productive class of the state (consisting of
thyself and this marriage-preacher), I assure you I expect to pass a few
hours of exquisite enjoyment when on that neighbouring star I survey in a
cursory manner that classic concourse newly risen from the dead, and at
length kneel down, and cry, “Good morning, my children! Such of you as
are Jews were wont to utter an ejaculatory prayer when ye met a wise man;

but what such utterance would suffice for me, now that I behold all the wise
and all the faculties at once, all of them my own blood relations too, who
amid the wolfish hunger of their desires have stedfastly refrained from
forbidden apples, pears, and pine apples, and, deep as their thirst for
wisdom might be, committed no orchard-robbery on the tree of knowledge,
though their first parents seized upon the forbidden fruit, although they had
never known what hunger was, and upon the tree of knowledge, although
they possessed all knowledge, except knowledge of the serpent nature.”
And then I shall arise from the ground, pass into the angelic crowd, fall on
the bosom of some distinguished descendant, and, throwing my arms
around him, say, “Thou, true, good, contented-minded, gentle son! If I
could just have shown thee only, sitting in thy brood-cell, to my Eve, the
queen-bee of this great swarm here present, at the time when I was
delivering the second head of my marriage sermon, I’m sure she would
have listened to reason, and given a favourable answer.’”
“And thou, Siebenkæs, art that same, true, good son, and thou restest ever
on the warm, heaving breast of

“Thy Friend.

“Postscript and Clausula Salutaris.

“Please to forgive me this merry private ball and witches’ dance upon
cheap and nasty letter-paper, notwithstanding that you are unfortunately an
infinitesimal fractional part of the German race, and as such, can’t be
expected either to stand, or to understand, such a dance of ideas. This is
why I never print anything for the unwieldy German intellect; entire sheets
which I have spawned full of playful idea-fishes of this sort I consign at
once to regions where such productions do not usually arrive till they attain
the evening of their days, having previously exercised the right of transit
through the booksellers’ shops. I was eight days in Hof, and am at present
living a retired life at Bayreuth; in both of these towns I have made faces,
that is, other people’s profiles; but most of the heads which sat or stood to
my scissors opined that all was not quite right in mine. Tell me the real truth
of the matter; it’s not altogether a matter of indifference to me, because if I
should turn out not to be quite ‘all there,’ I should be incapable of devising
my property by will, or of exercising various civil functions.

“In conclusion, I send a thousand kind remembrances and kisses to your
dear, good Lenette, and my compliments to Herr Schulrath Stiefel, and will
you please ask him if he is any relation to Magister Stiefel, the rector of
Holzdorf and Lochau (in Wittemberg), who prophesied (incorrectly, as I
consider) that the end of the world would take place on the 1st January,
1533, at 8 o’clock in the morning, and lived to die in his own bed after all. I
also send, for you and the ‘Advertiser,’ a couple of programmes of
Professor Lang’s of this place, relative to the General Superintendent of
Bayreuth, and one of Dr. Frank’s of Pavia. There is a very charming young
lady, exceedingly clever and intellectual, living here at the Sun Hotel (she is
in the front rooms, and I in the back). She has been very much pleased with
me and my face, I am happy to tell you, seeing how exactly you and I are
alike, the only difference between us being my lame foot. So that the things
I pride myself upon in ladies’ society are my likeness to you and my
weaknesses. Unless I have been misinformed, this lady is a poor niece of
your old uncle’s with the broken glass wig, and is being brought up at his
expense, and destined for a marriage with some Kuhschnappeler of the
upper ten thousand. Perhaps she may soon be forwarded to you, entered in
the way-bill as bridegroom’s effects.
“The above is my oldest news, but my newest news, namely your own
self, I shall not expect to arrive here at Bayreuth till I and the spring get
back to it together (for the day after to-morrow I am off to meet it in Italy),
and we, I and the spring, together beautify the world to such a degree that
you will certainly enjoy a happy time of it in Bayreuth, the houses and the
hills of that place being so particularly charming. And so, fare thee
somewhat well.”
They all felt certain that the Kuhschnappeler of rank for whom the
Heimlicher’s niece was being brought up could be none other than the
Venner Rosa, whose little burnt-down stump of a heart—what was left of it
after being hitherto made use of to set fire to the bosoms of female
humanity in general (as the lamp in a smoking-room serves to kindle the
pipes of the collective frequenters thereof)—would be the marriage torch to
light her to her new home.
As there were three heavens in this letter—one for each of the party—
kind remembrances for Lenette, the programmes for Peltzstiefel, the letter
itself for Siebenkæs—I shouldn’t have been astonished if the terzetto of

them had danced for joy. The Schulrath, intoxicated with delight—for the
glad blood rose to his sober head—opened the papers sent him upon the
square patterned supper-cloth (which was laid already), and hungrily began
to devour his three printed “relishes before supper,” and literary petits
soupers, upon the tin plate without even saying grace, until an invitation to
stay and have some supper reminded him that he must be off. But before
leaving, he petitioned that, by way of fee for having acted as middleman
and court of arbitration between them, or as an alkali to promote the
blending of his oil with her water—he might have a new profile of Lenette.
The old one cut out by Leibgeber (which the letter brought to his
recollection), and which, as we may remember, Leibgeber let him have,
happened to have been put into the pocket of his dressing-gown and sent to
the wash with it (being of much the same colour, moreover). “It shall be put
on the stocks to-night,” said Siebenkæs.
When the Schulrath was going, as he could see that the ring upon
Lenette’s finger didn’t squeeze it so uncomfortably as it had done (and gave
himself credit for having been the means of filing it smoother and padding it
softer), he shook her hand with much warmth, and said—
“I shall always be delighted to come whenever there’s the slightest thing
the matter with you two charming people.”
Lenette answered, “Oh yes, do come very often.”
And Siebenkæs added, “The oftener the better.”
And yet, when he had gone, the ring seemed to be not quite so
comfortable again, and medical students who may be working at
psychology may be a little surprised that during supper the advocate said
very little to his wife, and she very little to him. The reason was that he had
Leibgeber’s letter lying by his plate in the place where the bread normally
is, and the image of his beloved friend shone bright before his mental vision
from Bayreuth all athwart the far misty darkness between—their first happy
meeting to come floated magically before him. Hope shot down a pure
clearing ray into the dark mephitic cave where he was panting and toiling
now—and the coming spring stood like some cathedral tower all hung with
lamps lofty and bright in the distance, beaming through the dark night sky.
At length he “came to himself,” i. e. to his wife; the strong image of
Leibgeber had buoyed him up from the sharp stones which strewed the
present; the dear old friend, who had clipped out the bride’s profile up in the

choir on the wedding-day, and been with them in the early weeks of their
honeymoon, seemed to fling a chain of flower-wreaths about him and draw
him closer to the silent form by his side. “Well darling, and how are you
getting on?” he said, awaking from his reverie and taking her hand, now
that all was peace again between them. She had, however, the feminine
peculiarity or foible, habit at all events, of being much quicker to show that
she was vexed than that her anger was over; of, at all events, being slow to
show the latter; and of commencing a reconsideration of all the matters in
dispute at the very moment that amends have been made and accepted, and
pardon begged and granted. There are very few married women indeed who
will put their hand into their husbands’, and say “There, I’m good again,”
without a very considerable hesitation and delay; unmarried women are
much more ready to do it. Wendeline did hold hers out, but did it too coldly,
and drew it away again in a great hurry, to take up the table-cloth, which
she asked him to help her to smooth and fold up. He did this smilingly—she
gravely giving her whole attention to the process of folding the long white
parallelogram into exact squares—and at length, when the last and thickest
square was arrived at, he held it fast there—she pulled, trying to look very
serious—he looked at her very fondly and tenderly—she couldn’t help
smiling at this and then he took the tablecloth from her, pressed it and
himself with it to her heart, and said, in her arms, “Little thief! how can you
be so naughty to your old ragamuffin of a Siebenkæs, or whatever his name
may be?” And now the rainbow of a brighter future appeared shining above
the fast ebbing flood which had risen as high as their hearts so lately—But,
my dears, rainbows now-a-days very often mean just the reverse of what the
first was said to signify.
The prize he awarded to his queen of the rose-feast of the heart was to
ask her to let him take a profile of her pretty face, that Peltzstiefel might
find a joy and a present waiting for him on the morrow. I think I shall just
trace an outline of his outline-tracing for people of taste in this place; but I
must stipulate that nobody is to expect a pen to be a painter’s brush—or a
painter’s brush to be an engraver’s style—or an engraver’s style a flower
anther, generating generation upon generation of lilies and roses.
The advocate borrowed a drawing-board, viz. the façade of a new
pigeon-house, from Fecht the cobbler. Lenette’s shoulder fitted into the oval
portal of it as a clasp-knife does into its handle; a sheet of white paper was
tacked on to the board—her pretty, soft head was pressed on the stiff paper

—he applied, with much care and self restraint, his pencil at the upper part
of the brow, difficult as it was to catch the shadow in such immediate
proximity to the reality—and went slowly down the beautiful, flowery
declivity all roses and lilies. But little or nothing came of it; the back part of
the head was pretty good. His eyes would keep turning away from his work
to the sitter, so that he drew as vilely as a box-painter.
“Wendeline, your head isn’t still a moment,” he said. And indeed her
face, an well as her brain-fibres, shook by reason of the heightened beat of
her pulse and the quickening of her breathing; while, on the other hand, his
pencil stumbled when it came to the delicate basso relievo of her little nose,
fell into the cleft at her lips, and stranded on the shoal of her chin. He kissed
those lips which he couldn’t draw, and which she always had either too
much open or too tightly closed, and brought a shaving-glass and said,
“See, haven’t you got more faces than Janus, or any Indian god? The
Schulrath will think you were making faces, and I copying them. Look,
here’s where you moved, and I sprung after you like a chamois; the effect of
the jump is, that the upper part of the face sticks out before the lower like a
half mask. Just think how the Schulrath will stare in the morning.”
“Try once more, dear; I’ll do just as you tell me; I should like it to be
very nice,” Lenette said, blushing; and stiffened her neck, and steadied her
soft cheek against the drawing-board. And as her husband gently glided his
drawing ovipositor over her brow like a segment of some white hemisphere
—instead of breathing, he found she was holding her breath this time till
she shook again, and till the colour came to her face.
And here jealousy, like some exploding fire-ship, sent hard fragments of
the wreck of his shattered happiness crashing on a sudden against his heart.
“Ah!” (he thought) “can it be that she does really love him?” (i. e. the
Schulrath).
His pencil stood still in the obtuse angle between her nose and her chin as
if under a spell; he heard her let go her pent-up breath; his pencil made
black zigzags at the edge of the paper, and as he stopped at the closed lips,
which nothing warmer than his own, and her morning prayers, had ever
touched, and thought “Must this come upon me too? must this joy be taken
from me like all the rest? And am I drawing up my bill of divorce and
Uriah-letter here with my own very hands?” He could do no more at it. He
took the drawing-board quickly from her shoulder—fell upon her closed

lips—kissed away the pent-up sigh—pressed the life out of his jealousy
between his heart and hers, and said—
“I can’t do it till to-morrow, Lenette! Don’t be vexed, darling! Tell me,
are you quite as you used to be in Augspurg? Don’t you understand me?
Have you not the slightest idea what I am driving at?”
She answered quite innocently, “Now you will be annoyed, Firmian, I
know, but I really have not the slightest idea.”
Then the Goddess of Peace took from the God of Sleep his poppy
garland, and twined it into her own olive wreath and led the wedded pair,
garlanded and reconciled, hand in hand into the glittering, gleaming,
icefields of the land of dreams—the magic shadowy background of the
noisy jarring, shifting day—our camera obscura full of moving miniature
pictures of a world all dwarfed, in which man, like the Creator, dwells alone
with his own creations.

END OF THE PREFACE AND OF THE FIRST
BOOK.
The reader will remember that, at the beginning of the preface, I stated
that I succeeded in putting the old merchant into a sweet sleep, and in
providing his daughter with a gladsome feast of tabernacles, in the shape of
the young unopened buds of this, my little cottage-garden here. But the foul
fiend knows how to breeze up a sudden rain squall, and let it splattering
down upon all our loveliest fireworks. I was only performing a duty in
converting myself into a small, pocket circulating library for a poor lonely
thing of a girl, whose father gave her no chance of a word or two of rational
conversation except with her parrot, and with the family lawyer aforesaid.
The cage of the former was placed near her inkstand and waste-book; and
he acquired from his mistress as much in the shape of German-Italian as a
bookkeeper finds necessary for carrying on his foreign correspondence.
And a parrot being always incited to talkativeness by a looking-glass in his
cage, he and his language-mistress were enabled to look at themselves in it

together. The latter (the family lawyer) I myself was. But the Captain—for
fear of seductive princess-kidnappers and pirates such as me, and because
her mother was dead, and because she was useful in the business—would
let her speak to no man whomsoever, except in the presence of a third party
(viz., himself). So that it was very seldom any man came to the house,
except me; whereas, a father generally decoys whole museums of insects
into his house by means of a blooming daughter, just as a cherry-tree in
blossom near a window fills a room with wasps and bees. It wasn’t exactly
everybody who, when he wanted to speak a rational word with her (i. e. one
her father shouldn’t hear), could manage to draw the flute stop of his organ,
and then play away for an hour to this Argus till he should close his hundred
green eyes, so that two blue ones might be looked into. I did manage it,
indeed; but the world shall hear what sort of a psalm of thanksgiving and
vote of thanks I was treated to for my pains.
The old man—who had grown suspicious on account of the length of
time I had remained the evening before—had this evening only pretended
to be asleep, that he might see what I was going to be at. The rapidity with
which he went asleep (the reader no doubt remembers it at the beginning of
the book) ought to have struck me more than it did. I ought to have
reckoned on a contrary state of matters myself, and been ready with more
prefaces in addition to this present one, to serve as sleeping powders.
The rascally eavesdropper lay in wait till I had made my report on the
two Flower-pieces and the four first chapters of this book. At the end of the
fourth he bounced up as a mole-trap does when one walks on it, and
addressed me from behind with the following harangue of congratulation
—“Has the devil got you by the coat-tails? You must come here from
Berlin, must you, and stuff my daughter’s head with all sorts of atheistical,
nonsensical, romantic balderdash and nonsense, till she’ll be of no more use
in a shop than——”
“Just listen to one word, Herr Pigtail!” said I quite quietly, taking him
into the next room, where there was neither fire nor light; “just listen to one
single, half-word!”
I put my hands upon his shoulders, and said, “Herr Pigtail—for in
Charles the Great’s time every officer was so styled, because in those days
the soldiers wore tails, as the women do now—Herr Pigtail, I’m not going
to have a tussle with you to-night, when the old year’s going out and the

new year’s coming in. I assure you solemnly that I am the son of the ——,
[32] and that I shall never see you more, though you shall have all the

Vienna letters just the same. But I implore you, for God’s sake, to allow
your daughter to read. Now-a-days every tradesman reads—one of whom
will be her husband—and every tradesman’s wife. Yet for all this reading,
there’s still plenty of spinning and cooking going on; there are shirts in
plenty, and fat people in abundance. And as for corrupting her—why! that’s
just what a man who reads will find it most difficult to accomplish in the
case of a woman who reads, and most easy in the case of one who hardly
knows her A B C. Let me entreat you, Captain.”
“If you would but just mind your own affairs! What’s the girl to you?”
was his reply. It was a true harbour of refuge for me that, on neither of these
two evenings, the Christmas Eve or the New Year’s, had I, in the
enthusiasm of narration, so much as touched anything of the daughter’s but
about a groschen’s worth of hair (and that not her own), which got among
my fingers somehow or other, I hardly know how.
It would have been little to have seized her hands, in the fervour of my
biographical enthusiasm it would have been nothing at all; but, as I have
said, I hadn’t done it. I had said to myself, “Enjoy a pretty face as you
would a picture, and a female voice as you would a nightingale’s, and don’t
touch the picture or throttle the bird. What! must every tulip be out up for
salad, and all altar-cloths made into camisoles?”
Of all truths, the one which we bring ourselves to credit last of all is that
there are certain men whom no amount of truth will convince. That Herr
Pigtail was one of these presently occurred to me, not so soon as it ought to
have done, and I determined that the only sermon I should preach, to him
would be of the jocular and middle-age-Easter kind.[33] “Not so loud, Herr
Pigtail, or mademoiselle will hear every syllable; you have pinned her, poor
butterfly, into your letter book; but at the great day of judgment I shall
accuse you of not having given her my works to read. I do wish you had
only gone on pretending to be asleep long enough to allow me to tell her the
other books of the history of Kuhschnappel, where Siebenkæs’s troubles
occur, and his death, and his marriage. But, mademoiselle, I shall tell my
publisher in Berlin to send you the remaining books of the story the
moment they are in print, fresh out of the press, still all damp, like a
morning newspaper. And now, adieu, Herr Pigtail; may Heaven grant you a

new heart with the new year, and your dear daughter a second heart inside
her own.”
The elemental conflict of his and my dissimilar components raged louder
and louder: but I say no more about it—every additional word would have
the appearance of an act of vindictiveness. This, however, I may at all
events say: happy is every daughter who may read my works while her
father is awake (very few such daughters, however, recognise this truth).
Unhappy is every dependent of an Oehrmann, because he will be starved, as
a greyhound is, that he may be the more nimble at running (I do not mean
on the piano with his fingers), as the dancers’ children get nothing to eat
that they may spring the better! And fortunate are all needy persons who
have nothing to do with him; because Jacob Oehrmann gives to everyone
just as much moral, as he possesses mercantile, credit, to which recruit-
measure of worth he has been habituated by his fellow-tradesmen, who
measure each other with yard-measures of metal. The only people who find
favour in his sight are those who are complete paupers, and this because
they serve as pedestals for his charity; for the alms which he distributes in
the name of the town and out of its exchequer, he looks upon as his own.
Peace be with him! At that time I had not taken a part myself in celebrating
the peace-festival of the soul which I have described in the Fruit-piece of
this book, and I had read but little of what I have there written concerning
the year of Jubilee which ought to last as long as the Long Parliament in our
hearts with respect to all our moral debtors; for if I had I should not even
have contradicted Herr Pigtail.
I vexed him, I am sorry to say, once more by my parting speech to his
daughter (for I wished him and her my wishes both together and at once, so
that it might not appear which was for which).
“Herr Pigtail, and mademoiselle, I bid you a long farewell. No more shall
I be able, in elysian evenings, to relate to you any of my biographies (shorn
of the digressions); and the feast days and the holidays, as well as the eves
thereof, will come and will go, but he who has caused you such vivid
emotions will come no more. May fate send thee books instead of
bookmakers, sometimes stir thy dull heart with a poetic throb, heave thy
still breast with tender sighs prophetic of the future—bring to thy eyes some
gentle tear drops, such as an andante causes to flow, and lead thee on

through the hot, toilsome summer days, not to an after summer, but to a
flowery tuneful spring. And so, good night.”
It goes to my heart to part with people; even were it my sworn hereditary
foe: one is going to see him no more. Pauline was anything but my sworn
hereditary foe. Out in the streets there were more new year well-wishers
going their rounds, the watchmen, who were giving utterance to their good
wishes in wind instrumental music and miserable verse. Stiff, old-
fashioned, rude verses always touch me more—particularly in an
appropriate mouth—than your sapless, new poems, all tricked out with
artificial flowers and ice-plants; poetry altogether wretched is better than
the mediocre. I decided upon going through the town gate; my heart was
filled with emotions of very different kinds—for you see it was only eleven
o’clock and the cold night was full of stars. And it was the last night of the
year, and I didn’t want to pass from the old year to the new in sleep, though
that is how I would pass from this life to the next. I resolved to take that
flushed, throbbing heart of mine out of the streets, and to a quieter
company.
Place a man in some waste Sahara desert stretching further than the eye
can reach, and afterwards pen him up into the narrowest of corners, he will
be struck, in both cases, by the same vivid consciousness of his own
individuality—the widest spaces and the narrowest have the same powerful
effect in quickening our perception of our own Ego and of its relationship.
There is nothing, on the whole, oftener forgotten than that which is what
forgets—namely, the forgetter’s self. Not only do the mechanical
employments of labour and trade always draw men out of themselves, but
the mental effort of study and investigation, also, renders scholars and
philosophers just as deaf and blind to their own Ego, and its position with
respect to other entities—deafer and blinder even. Nothing is more difficult
than to convert an object of contemplation (which we always move away to
a certain distance from ourselves, and from the mind’s eye, so as to bring
the latter to bear on it properly) into an object of sensation, and to feel that
the object is the eye itself. I have often read whole books on the subject of
the Ego, and of printing, right through, until at last I saw, to my
astonishment, that the Ego and the printed letters were before—me so to
speak under my nose.

Let the reader say truly: has he not even at this moment, while I have
been talking, been forgetting that there are letters before him, ay, and his
own Ego into the bargain?
But out where I was, under the twinkling heavens, and on a snow-
covered height, round about which there gleamed a white, frozen plain, my
Ego burst away from its relationships (while in connection with them it was
no more than an attribute, a quality), and it became a personage—a separate
entity. And then I could look upon myself. All marked points of time—
stanzas as it were, or music phrases, of existence—new years’ days for
example, and birthdays, lift man high out of and up above the waves which
are round him; he clears the water from his eyes, and looks about him, and
says—“How the current has been carrying me along, drowning my hearing,
and blinding my sight! Those are the waves, down there, onward, which
have been bearing me along, and these, now coming toward me, when I dip
down among them, will whirl me away!”
Without this clear, distinct consciousness of one’s Ego, there can be no
freedom, and no calm equanimity amid the crowding elbowing tumult of
the world.
I shall go on with my story. I stood upon an iceberg, but my soul was all
aglow—the cloven moon shone brightly down, and the shadows of the
pine-trees about me lay, like dismembered limbs of the night, black upon
the lily ground of snow. Away, some distance from me, a man seemed to be
kneeling motionless on the ground.
And now 12 o’clock struck, and 1794, year of war and tumult, fell, with
all its rivers of blood, into the ocean of eternity; the booming after-tone of
the bell seemed to say to me, “Now has Destiny, with the twelfth stroke of
her hammer, knocked down the old year to you, poor perishing mortals, at
her auction of minutes.”
The kneeling man now stood up and went quickly away. I could long see
him and his shadow disappearing in the moonlight.
I left my height, the boundary hill between two years, and went down to
where the man had been kneeling. I found a crucifix and a black leather
prayer-book in duodecimo, all thumbed yellow, except one leaf at the
beginning on which was the name of the owner, whose knees had worn
deep traces in the ice. I knew him well, he was a cottager whose two sons

had had to go to the war. On looking more closely, I found he had drawn a
circle in the snow, to keep off evil spirits.
I saw it all; the simple, weak-minded creature, whose soul was darkened
by a perpetual annular eclipse, had gone there on this solemn night to
hearken to the hollow distant muttering thunder of the coming storm, and
laid his prostrate soul, as it were, upon the earth to hear the distant march of
the approaching foe. “Shallow, timid soul,” thought I, “why should the dead
that are to be come floating athwart the face of the clear, still night—thy
sleeping sons among them, memberless? Why strive already to see the
darting flames of conflagrations yet to come, and to hear the dismal turmoil,
the bitter wail, of a woe as yet unborn? The coffins of the coming year
have, as in times of pestilence, no inscriptions yet—why should the names
appear upon them? Oh! thy Solomon’s ring has been no protection against
the destroying angel who dwells within our breasts. And that vague, ugly
giant-cloud, behind which are death and the future, will prove, on approach,
to be death and the future itself.”
In hours like these we are all ready to lay our hats and swords on to the
bier—ay, and ourselves as well—our old wounds burn anew, and our hearts,
not being truly healed, a little thing breaks them again, like arms
imperfectly set. But the cruel, piercing lightning flash of some great minute,
the reflection of which stretches gleaming athwart the whole river of our
life, is necessary to us to make us blind to the ignes fatui and glowworms
which meet us, to guide us, every hour: and frivolous, giddy man needs
some powerful shock to counteract his tendency to continual petty naggling.
Therefore, to us little crustaceans sticking with our suckers upon the ship of
this earth, every new year’s night is, like night in the old mythologies, a
mother of many gods in us—and in such a night there begins for us a better
normal year than that which began in 1624. And I felt as if I should kneel,
humble and penitent, on the spot where the poor childless father had knelt.
But now a brisker air brought to my ears a burst of gladsome music; it
came like the breath of flowers across the frozen plain, horns and trumpets
on the church tower, sending their cheering harmonies over the sleeping
earth, ushering, with glad vigorous tones, the first hour of the new year in to
a world of anxious, doubting men. And I too grew glad and strong; I raised
my glance from the white shroud of the coming spring, and gazed at the
moon; and on these spots on her face (these spots which grow green as you

approach) I saw our earthly spring reposing upon flowers, and already
moving his young wings, soon to take his flight with other birds of passage,
and, bright with glittering plumes, and hailed by skylarks’ anthems, come
and alight upon our shores.
The distant new year’s music flowed around me still I felt much happier,
and far more tender; I saw the coming sorrows in the new born year, but
they wore such lovely masks that they were more like sorrows that are past,
or like the music around me—just as the rain which falls through the great
caverns in the Derbyshire hills sounds in the distance like music.
But when I looked around me, and saw the white earth shining like a
white sun, and the silent deep blue sphere all round, like a household circle
of one great family—and as the music, like lovelier sighs, accompanied my
thoughts—as I fixed my gaze, with grateful heart, upon the starry sky where
all these thousands of stedfast witnesses of the beautiful moments
(moments faded, out of bloom, indeed, now—but the great Beneficence
spreads their seed for evermore)—when I thought of the men asleep all
around me, and wished that they might all be happier when they opened
their eyes in the morning—and when I thought of those awake UNDER me,
whose slumbering souls stood in need of such a wish,—my heart, oppressed
by the music, and by the night, grew heavy and grew full, and the blue sky,
the glittering moon, and the sparkling snow-height all melted into one great
floating shimmer.
And in the shimmer, and amid the music, I heard voices of my friends,
and dear fellow-creatures, tenderly and anxiously wishing their new year’s
wishes. They touched my heart so deeply, that I could but barely think my
own—
“Oh! may you all be happy all the years of your lives.”

END OF BOOK I.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND, THIRD, AND
FOURTH BOOKS.

It has often been a source of much annoyance to me that to every preface
I write I am obliged to append a book—like the endorsement on a bill of
exchange—or an appendix to letters A to Z. Many a man who dabbles in
authorship by way of amusement has his books sent to him all ready written
and complete, straight from the cradle; so that all he has to do is to attach
his gold frontlets of prefaces to their foreheads—which is nothing but
painting the corona about the sun. As yet, however, not a single author has
applied to me for a preamble to a book, although for several years I have
had a considerable number of prefaces by me (all ready beforehand, and
going at great bargains), in which I extol to the best of my ability works
which have not as yet come in to being. In fact, I have now a perfect
museum of these prize medals and commemoration medals of other
people’s cleverness at the service of anyone who may stand in need of
them; they are all made by the very finest of mint-machinery, and my
collection of them is increasing day by day; so that I shall be obliged to sell
it off wholesale before very long (I don’t see what else I can do), and bring
out a book—consisting of nothing but pre-existent prefaces.
They will still be obtainable singly, however, until the Easter fair, and
authors who make early application can have the entire fascicle of preludes
forwarded to them, so that they can pick out for themselves whichever
preface seems to them the most laudatory of a book. After the Easter fair
however, when the Book of Prefaces above mentioned comes out (and it
will be interleaved with the fair catalogue), the literary world will only be
beglorified in corpore, in coro, and I shall be (so to speak) making a present
of a patent of nobility to the republic of letters in the lump,—as the Empress
Queen did in 1775 to the whole mercantile community of Vienna; although
I have before my eyes (in the shape of the poor reviewers who work

themselves well nigh to death, hammering and building away at the temple
of fame, and at triumphal arches) the melancholy proof that though a man
were to extol the republic of letters even in six volumes folio, he would get
less for it than Sannazaro did for belauding the republic of Venice in as
many lines—for each line in the latter case brought the poet in a matter of a
hundred five-dollar pieces.
I propose to interstratify one of the prefaces in question in this place by
way of a specimen and experiment, making as if its celebrated author had
written it to order for this book (which is the actual truth, moreover). There
is no difficulty in my splitting myself up into two characters, the flower
painter and the preface maker. But,—as one cannot quite lose sight of
feelings of becoming modesty—I carefully pick out the most miserable
specimen of the lot, one in which laudation occurs but to a very moderate
extent, one which places the author of the book attached to it upon a funeral
car, rather than upon a triumphal one, with nothing whatever to draw it
along moreover; whereas the other prefaces harness posterity to them, and
the reading public are, by them, yoked on to the heavenly chariot, the
Elijah’s chariot, of Immortality, in which they draw the author along.
In conclusion, then, I have only to observe that the celebrated author of
‘Hesperus’ has been kind enough to look through my Flower-pieces,
and contribute to them the following preface, which will be found well
worthy of perusal.

PREFACE, BY THE AUTHOR OF ‘HESPERUS.’

The following remarks may be thrown into the form of a series of
postulates, which are, at the same time, so many similes.
Many authors (Young is an instance) set fire to their nerve-spirit, which,
like burning spirit of another kind (brandy), tinges every person who stands
round the inkbottle where it is flaring with a sham DEADLY pallor. But,
unfortunately, each looks only at the others, none looks into the mirror. The
effect of the proximity of this universal mortality all about, upon people and
authors, is that each is impressed with a livelier sense of the exceptional
nature of his own immortality; and this is remarkably comforting to us all.
The consequence is, as it seems to me, very plain. Poets, living in fifth, or
fiftieth floors, may make poems, but not marriages; neither may they keep,
nor establish, houses. Canaries’ breeding cages have to be more roomy than
their singing cages.
If this be so, then, what does the author’s pen do? Like a child’s, it traces
in ink the characters which nature has faintly marked in the reader with
pencil.
The author’s strings only vibrate in unison with the reader’s octaves,
fifths, fourths, and thirds—not with his seconds or sevenths. Unsympathetic
readers do not become sympathetic ones; it is only the cognate, or
congruent, sort which rise to the author’s level or pass beyond it.
And with this stands or falls my fourth postulate. The iron shoe of
Pegasus is the armature of the magnet of truth, increasing its power of
attraction; yet we are hungry birds, and fly at the poet’s grapes as though
they were real ones, thinking the boy a painted one, when we really ought to
be frightened at him.
The transition from this to the fifth postulate is a self-evident matter. Man
has such a high opinion of everything in the shape of antiquity, that he
prolongs it, and keeps it alive, and lives according to it, though it be but the

cover and the mask of the very poison which will destroy itself. There are
two proofs of this proposition which I leave aside, of set purpose; the first
is, Religion, which is all gnawed to worm dust; the second, Freedom, which
is quite as much crumbled to powder as the other. In my capacity of a
member of the Lutheran Church, I merely glance at the subject of relics (in
support of the proposition)—relics, in the case of which, as Vasquez the
Jesuit informs us, if they chance to be entirely eaten up of worms, we must
continue to worship what remains—that is to say, the worms which have
eaten them. Wherefore, meddle not with that nest of worms, the time in
which thou livest, or it will eat thee up; a million of worms are quite equal
to one dragon.
This must be admitted and assumed, at least if my sixth postulate is to
have any sense in it which is,—that no man is wholly indifferent to, and
unaffected by, every kind of truth; indeed even if it be only to poetical
reflections (illusions) that he swears allegiance—inasmuch as he does even
that he thereby does homage to truth; for in all poetry it is but the part
which is true which goes to the heart (or head), just as in our passions and
emotions nothing but the Moral produces effect. A reflection which should
be nothing whatever but a reflection would necessarily, for that very reason,
not be a reflection. Every semblance (meaning every thing which we see, or
suppose we see) presupposes the existence of light somewhere, and is itself
light, only in an enfeebled or reflected condition. Only, most people in our,
not so much enlightened as enlightening times, are like nocturnal insects
who avoid, or are pained by, the light of day, but, in the night, fly to every
nocturnal light, every phosphorescent surface.
The graves of the best men are like those of the Moravians, level and flat,
and this earthly sphere of ours is a Westminster Abbey of such levellings
and flattenings—ah! what innumerable drops of tears as well as blood
(which are what the three grand trees of this world—the trees of Life, of
Knowledge, and Liberty—are watered with) have been shed, but never
counted. History, in painting the human race, does not follow the example
of that painter who, making a portrait of a one-eyed king, drew only his
seeing profile; what history paints is the blind side, and it needs some grand
calamity to bring great men to light—as comets are seen during total
eclipses of the sun. Not upon the battle-field only—upon the holy ground of
virtue also, and upon the classic soil of truth—the pedestal whereon history
raises on high some single hero whose name rings in all men’s ears has to

be composed and built up of thousands of other heroes who have fought
and fallen, nameless and unknown. The noblest deeds of heroism are done
within four walls, not before the public gaze,—and as history keeps record
only of the men sacrificed, and, on the whole, writes only in spilt blood,
doubtless our annals are grander and more beautiful in the eyes of the all-
pervading spirit of the universe than in those of the history-writer; the great
scenes of history are estimated according to the numbers of angels or devils
on the stage, the men not being taken into account.
These are the grounds on which I rely when I assert with a good deal of
boldness that when we inhale the perfume of the full-blown blossoms of joy
with too deep and strong an inhalation, without having first given them a
good shake, we run the risk of snuffing up some tormenting insect (before
we know what we are about) through the ethmoid into the brain;[34] and
who—tell me if you can—is to get it out again? Whereas little or nothing of
a risky sort can be snuffed up out of Flower-pieces, and their painted
calices, since painted worms remain where they are.
This, then, is what I have to postulate by means of similes. What the
public postulates, or demands, is my opinion of these Flower-pieces. The
author is a promising youth of five years of age;[35] he and I have been
friends since childhood, and, I think, can assert that we have but one soul
between us, as Aristotle says should be the case with friends. He gets me to
read over everything he thinks of publishing, and to give him my opinion
and advice. And, as I returned these Flower-pieces to him with the warmest
(and, at the same time, sincerest) expression of my approval, he has
requested me to make my verdict somewhat more widely known, believing
as he does (rather too flatteringly perhaps) that it may carry a certain
amount of weight with it, more especially as it is an impartial verdict, and,
as such, one which can be placed in the hands of the critics as a species of
ruler wherewith to draw the lines upon which their verdicts may be written.
In this, however, he goes a little too far. All I can say is that the work is
written quite as if I had done it myself. There is no greater amount of
dynamic ornamentation in it than is usual in books, and, happy as the author
would have been to have thundered, stormed, and poured in it, there was of
course no room in a parish advocate’s lodgings for Rhine cataracts,
thunderstorms, tropical hurricanes (of tropes) or waterspouts, and he has
had to reserve his more terrific tornadoes for a future work. I have his

permission to mention the name of this future work; it is the ‘Titan.’ In this
work he means to be an absolute Hecla, and shatter the ice of his country
(and himself into the bargain) to pieces; like the volcanoes in Iceland, he
will spout up a column of boiling water four feet in diameter to a height of
eighty-nine or ninety feet in the air, and that at such a temperature that when
this wet fire pillar falls down again and flows into the book shops, it will
still be warm enough to boil eggs hard or their mother soft. “Then” (he
always says—very sadly however—because he sees what a hard matter it is
to distinguish between full half of our battling and harrying here below and
a Jack Pudding farce and piece of utter buffoonery and nonsense,—also,
that the cradle of this life rocks us, and stills us indeed, but carries us not a
step on our way)—“then may the Arbor Toxicaria Macassariensis[36] of the
Ideal, beneath which I have lost a little hair already, go on poisoning me,
and dispatch me to the Land of the Ideal. At all events, I have knelt down
and prayed under the solemnising soul-elevating sighing roar of its death-
dealing branches. And why should there be a hut made ready for the
traveller beside the eternal well of truth, marked with the title ‘Travellers’
REST,’ if no one ever enters it?” He wants, by way of broad “flies” for his
life stage on earth, merely a regular, downright, rainy year or two (two will
suffice); for a broad, bright, open sky overpowers us, and weakens the
hand’s pen power by making the eyes over full. And here the book-maker
differs markedly from his provision-contractor, the papermaker, who shuts
his mill up precisely when the weather is wet.
I should also be glad if readers would have the goodness to go once more
through the few chapters composing the first book—that they may see what
they really lack; and indeed a book which is not worth reading twice is not
worth reading once.
In conclusion, I (albeit the most inconsiderable clubbist and vote-
possessor of all the public) would fain incite the author to the production of
other seedlings, suckers, and infantas of the same stamp, trusting that the
reading world may form its opinion on his work with the same careful
favour and indulgent approval as I have formed mine.

Jean Paul Fr. Richter.

Hof in Voigtland,
June 5th, 1796.

Thus far my friend’s preface. Utterly absurd as it is, my own preface, you
see, has got to be concluded too, and at the end of it I can but sign myself as
my aforesaid man Friday and namesake does, videlicet,

Jean Paul Fr. Richter.
Hof in Voigtland,
June 5th, 1796.

BOOK II.

CHAPTER V.

THE BROOM AND THE BESOM AS PASSION IMPLEMENTS—THE
IMPORTANCE OF A BOOKWRITER—DIPLOMATIC
NEGOTIATIONS AND DISCUSSIONS ON THE SUBJECT OF
CANDLE SNUFFING—THE PEWTER CUPBOARD—
DOMESTIC HARDSHIPS AND ENJOYMENTS.
Catholics hold that there were fifteen mysteries in the life of Christ—five
of Joy, five of Woe, five of Glory. I have carefully accompanied our hero
through the five joyful mysteries of which the Linden honey-month of his
marriage has had to tell. I now come with him to the five mysteries of Woe
with which the series of the mysteries of most marriages is—concluded. I
trust, however, that his may yet be found to contain the five of Glory also.
In my first edition, I began this book of my hero’s story in an
unconcerned manner, with the above sentence just as if it were literally
correct. A second, and carefully revised edition, however, renders it
incumbent upon me to add, as an emendation, that the fifteen mysteries in
question do not come one after another, like steps of stairs, or ancestors in a
pedigree, but are shuffled up together like good and bad cards in a hand.
Yet, in spite of this shuffling, the joy outbalances the sorrow, at any rate in
its duration, as has been the case, indeed, with this terrestrial globe, our
planet itself, which has survived several last days, and as a consequence
still more springs, that is to say, re-creations on a smaller scale. I mention
all this to save a number of poor devils of readers from the dreadful thought
that they have got to wade through a whole “Book II.” full of tears, partly to
be read about, partly to be shed out of compassion. I am not one of those
authors who, like very rattlesnakes, can sit and gaze upon thousands of
charmed people running up and down, a prey to every kind of agitation,
suspense, and anxiety, till his time comes to spring upon them and swallow
them up.
When Siebenkæs awoke in the morning, he at once packed the devil of
jealousy, the marriage devil, off to the place where all other devils dwell.

For a calming sleep lowers the pulse of the soul’s fever—the grains thereof
are fever-bark for the cold fever of hate, and also for the hot fever of love.
Indeed he put down the tracing board, and with a pantograph made a
correct, reduced copy of his yesterday’s free translation of the
Engelkrautian countenance, and blackened it nicely. When it was done, he
said to his wife, for very love of her, “We’ll send him the profile this
morning, at once. It may be a good long while before he comes to fetch it.”
“Oh yes! he won’t be here till Wednesday, and by that time he’ll have
forgotten all about it.” “But I could bring him here sooner than that,”
Siebenkæs answered; “I need only send him the Russian Trinity dollar of
1679 to get changed for me; he won’t send me a farthing of the money he’ll
bring it himself as he always has done all through Leibgeber’s collection.”
“Or you might send him the dollar and the picture both,” said Lenette, “he
would like it better.” “Which would he like better?” he asked. She didn’t
see exactly what answer to make to this ridiculous question (whether she
meant the stamped face or the pictured one) sprung upon her like a mine in
this sort of way, and got out of her difficulty by saying, “Well, the things, of
course.” He spared her any further catechising.
The Schulrath, however, sent nothing but an answer to the effect that he
was beside himself with delight at the charming presents, and would come
to express his thanks in person, and to settle up with the advocate, by the
end of the following week at latest. The little dash of bitter flavour which
was perceptible to the taste in this unexpected answer of the too happy
Schulrath, was by no means sweetened away by the arrival at this moment
of the messenger of the Inheritance Office, with Heimlicher von Blaise’s
first proceedings in the matter of the plaint lodged against him, consisting
of a petition for three weeks’ grace within which to lodge answers, a delay
which the Court had readily accorded. Siebenkæs, as his own poor’s
advocate, lived in the sure and certain hope that the promised land of
inheritance, flowing with milk and honey, would be reached by his children,
though he would in all probability have long ere that time perched in the
wilderness of the law; for justice is given to recompensing the children, and
the children’s children, for the uprightness of the fathers, and for the
goodness of their cause. It was more or less in convenient, at the same time,
to have nothing to live upon during one’s own lifetime. The Russian Trinity
dollar—for which the Schulrath hadn’t even paid as yet—couldn’t be lived
upon, and there were but one or two queue ducats remaining of the treasury

chest provided by Leibgeber, for the carrying on of operations against the
Heimlicher. This gold coin and those few silver ones were (although I have
said nothing about it till now) the entire money contents remaining in the
Leibgeberian saviour’s scrip, and indeed none but a true disciple and
follower of the Saviour could be expected to hold out upon them. My
silence on this matter of the emptying of the coin cabinet may perhaps be
accepted in evidence of the fact that I try as much as I can to avoid
mentioning anything calculated to give my readers pain.
“Oh! I shall get on somehow or other,” said Siebenkæs quite gleefully, as
he set to work harder than ever at his writing, with the view of getting a
considerable haul of money into the house, at the earliest moment possible,
in the shape of payment for his ‘Selection from the Devil’s Papers.’
But there was a fresh purgatorial fire now being stoked and blown, till it
blazed hotter and hotter about him. I have refrained from saying anything
about the fire in question till now, though he has been sitting roasting at it
since the day before yesterday, Lenette being the cook, and his writing table
the larkspit.
During the few days when the wordless quarrel was going on, he had got
into a habit of listening with the closest attention to what Lenette was
doing, as he sat writing away at his ‘Selection from the Devil’s Papers’; and
this sent his ideas all astray. The softest step, the very slightest shake of
anything affected him just as if he had had hydrophobia, or the gout, and
put one or two fine young ideas to death, as a louder noise kills young
canaries, or silkworms.
He controlled himself very well at first. He pointed out to himself that his
wife really could not help moving about, and that as long as she hadn’t a
spiritual or glorified body and furniture to deal with, she couldn’t possibly
go about as silently as a sunbeam, or as her invisible good and evil angels
behind her. But while he was listening to this cours de morale, this
collegium pietatis of his own, he lost the run of his satirical conceits and
contexts, and his language was deprived of a good deal of its sparkle.
But the morning after the silhouette evening, when their hearts had
shaken hands and renewed the old royal alliance of Love, he could go much
more openly to work, and so, as soon as he had blackened the profile, and
had only his own original creations to go on blackening—i. e. when he was

going to begin working in his own charcoal burning hut, he said to his wife,
as a preliminary—
“If you can help it, Lenette, don’t make very much noise to-day. I really
can hardly get on with my writing, if you do—you know it’s for
publication.”
She said “I’m sure you can’t hear me—I go about so very quietly.”
Although a man may be long past the years of his youthful follies, yet in
every year of his life there crop up a few weeks and days in which he has
fresh follies to commit. It was truly in a moment of one of these days that
Siebenkæs made the request above mentioned; for he had now laid upon
himself the necessity of lying in wait and watching to see what Lenette
would do in consequence of it. She skimmed over the floor, and athwart the
various webs of her household labours, with the tread of a spider. Like her
sex in general, she had disputed his little point, merely for the sake of
disputing it, not of doing what she was asked not to do. Siebenkæs had to
keep his ears very much on the alert to hear what little noise she did make,
either with her hands or her feet—but he was successful, and did hear the
greater part of it. Unless when we are asleep we are more attentive to a
slight noise than to a loud one; and our author listened to her wherever she
went, his ear and his attention going about fixed to her like a pedometer
wherever she moved. In short he had to break off in the middle of the satire,
called “The Nobleman with the Ague,” and jump up and cry to her (as she
went creeping about), “For one whole hour have I been listening and
watching that dreadful tripping about on tiptoe. I had much rather you
would stamp about in a pair of the iron-soled sandals people used to wear
for beating time in.[37] Please go about as you usually do, darling.”
She complied, and went about almost as she usually did. He would have
very much liked to have prohibited the intermediate style of walking, as he
had the light and the heavy; but a husband doesn’t care to contradict himself
twice in one morning; once is enough. In the evening he asked her if she
would mind going about the house in her stockings when he was at work at
his writing. She would find it nice and cool for the feet. “In fact,” he added,
“as I’m working all the forenoon literally for our bread, it would be well if
you would do nothing that isn’t absolutely necessary while I am at my
literary work.”

Next morning he sat in judgment (mentally) upon everything that went
on behind his back, and challenged it to see if it could produce the free-pass
of necessity—going on with his writing all the time, but doing it worse than
usual. This scribbling martyr endured a great many things with as much
patience as he could muster, but when Wendeline took to whisking the
straw under the green painted marriage TORUS with a long broom, the
cross grew too heavy for his shoulder. It happened, moreover, that he had
been reading two days before in an old Ephemeris of scientific inquirers,
that a clergyman, of the name of Johann Pechmann, couldn’t bear the sound
of a besom—that it nearly took his breath away, and that he once took to his
heels and bolted when a crossing sweeper accidentally ran against him. The
effect of his having read this was, that he was involuntarily more observant
and intolerant of a cognate discomfort. He called out to the domestic
sweeper in the next room, from his chair where he sat—
“Lenette, do not go on scrubbing and switching about with that besom of
yours, it drives away the whole of my best ideas out of my head. There was
an old clergyman once of the name of Pechmann, who would rather have
been condemned to sweep a crossing in Vienna himself, than to listen to
another sweeping it—he would rather have been flogged with a birch-
broom, than have heard the infernal sound of it swishing and whishing.
How is a man to get a coherent idea, fit to go to the printer and publisher,
into his head with all this sweeping and scrubbing going on?”
Lenette did what every good wife, and her lap dog, would have done; she
left off the noise by degrees. At last she laid down the besom, and merely
whisked three straws and a little feather fluff gently with the hair-broom,
from under the bed, not making as much noise even as he did with his
writing. However the editor of the ‘Devil’s Papers’ managed to hear it, in a
manner beyond his fondest hopes. He rose up, went to the bedroom door
and called in at the room, “My darling, it’s every bit as hellish a torment to
me if I can hear it at all. You may fan those miserable sweepings with a
peacock’s feather, or a holy-water asperger, or you may puff them away
with a pair of bellows, but I and my poor book must suffer and pay the
piper all the same.”
“I’m quite done now, at all events,” she said.
He set to work again, and gaily took up the threads of his fourth satire,
“Concerning the five Monsters and their receptacles, whereon I at first

intended to subsist.”
Meanwhile Lenette gently closed the door, so that he was driven to the
conclusion that there was something or other going on to annoy him again
in his Gehenna and place of penitence. He laid down his pen and cried—
“Lenette, I can’t hear very distinctly what it is—but you’re up to
something or other in there that I can not stand. For God’s dear sake, stop it
at once, do put a period to my martyrdom and sorrows of Werther, for this
one day—come here, let me see you.”
She answered, all out of breath with hard work—
“I’m not doing anything.”
He got up and opened the door of his chamber of torture. There was his
wife rubbing away with a piece of grey flannel, polishing up the green rails
of the bed. The author of this history once lay sick of smallpox in a bed of
this kind, and knows them well. But the reader may not be aware that a
green slumber cage of this kind is a good deal like a magnified canaries’
breeding cage with its latticed folding doors or portcullises, and that this
trellis and hothouse for dreams is, though less handsome in appearance,
much better for health than our heavy bastille towers all hung about with
curtains which keep away every breath of fresh air. The advocate swallowed
about half a pint of bedroom air, and said, in measured accents—
“You’re at your brushing and sweeping again, are you? although you
know quite well that I’m sitting there working like a slave for you and
myself too, and that I’ve been writing away for the last hour with scarcely
an idea in my head. Oh! my heavenly better half! out with all your
cartridges at one shot, for God’s sake, and don’t finish me off altogether
with that rag of yours.”
Lenette, full of astonishment said, “It’s simply impossible, old man. that
you can hear me in the next room”—and polished away harder than ever.
He took her hand, somewhat hastily, though not roughly, and said in a
louder tone, “Come, get up!—It’s exactly that which I complain of, that I
can’t hear you in the next room; I’m obliged to rack my brains to guess
what you’re at—and the only ideas left in my head are connected with
brushing and scrubbing, so that all the brilliant notions which I might
otherwise be putting down on paper are driven away. My darling child,
nobody could possibly sit and work away here more composedly and
contentedly than I, if it were only grape-shot and canister, howitzer shells,

and hundred-pounders that you were banging away with at my back out of
these embrasures of yours. What it is that I really can not stand, is a quiet
noise.”
All this talk having put him a little out of temper, he fetched her out of
the room, rag and all, saying—
“It does seem a little hard that, while I’m labouring away here with all
my might, working myself almost to death, to provide a little entertainment
for the reading public, a regular bear-baiting pit should be started in my
own room, and that an author’s very bed should be turned into a siege-
trench, and arrows and fire-balls sent about his ears out of it. There, I shan’t
be writing while we’re at dinner, I’ll talk the thing out at full length with
you then.”
At noon, then,[38] as he was about to enter on the subject of the morning’s
tourney, he had first to hold a prayer-tourney. I mean this: “prayers” do not,
in Nürnberg and Kuhschnappel, mean a certain hereditary office and service
of mass in a court chapel, but—the ringing of the twelve o’clock bell. Now
the dining-table of our couple stood against the wall, and was not put in the
middle of the floor except for meals. Well, Siebenkæs never succeeded
above twice during his married life in having this table brought forward
BEFORE the soup came in (for if a woman ONCE forgets a thing, she goes on
forgetting it a thousand times running[39]), though he preached his lungs as
dry as a fox‘s (which are used for curing ours); both soup and table were
always moved together, after the soup came in, without the spilling of a
greater quantity of the latter than one might have used in swallowing a pill.
To-day this was the case as usual. Siebenkæs slowly chewed the pill
which he swallowed with the soup. The delay in moving the table he
observed anxiously (as if it had been a delay in the arrival of an equinox),
with a long face and slow breathing, and when the soup-libation was duly
poured as usual, he broke out as follows, in a calm tone of voice, however
—
“The fact is, Lenette, we are on board a good ship. At sea, you know,
people spill their soup because their vessel rolls and pitches—and ours is
spilt for a similar reason. See here, the dinner-table and the morning besom
are both in a tale together; they are two conspirators who will blow out your
husband’s candle—to use a strong expression—before they have done.”

This, the exordium of his sermon, was followed by way of hymn, by the
arrival of the town fool of Kuhschnappel, who brought in a great sheet of
paper containing an invitation to the shooting match on St. Andrew’s Day,
the 30th of November. Every one of us must, I am sure, have gathered from
what has already been said that the only money left in the house was the
queue-ducat. At the same time, Siebenkæs couldn’t leave the shooting-club,
without thereby granting to himself a certificate of poverty, a testimonium
paupertatis, in the face of the whole town. And really a shooting-ticket for
this match was almost as good as mining shares or East India stock to a man
who was as good a shot as Siebenkæs. It would also give him an
opportunity of doing that public honour to his wife which she, as a senate
clerk’s daughter from Augspurg, had a right to expect. Unfortunately,
however, the grave man of folly couldn’t be got to give change for the
curious queue-ducat, particularly as Siebenkæs aroused his suspicions with
respect to it himself, by saying. “This is a very good tail or queue-ducat, I
assure you. I don’t wear a tail myself,” he added, “but that’s no reason why
a ducat shouldn’t, if the King of Prussia chooses to immortalise his own by
having it stamped upon it. Wife, would you get our landlord, the
hairdresser, to come up; nobody can know better than he whether it’s a
queue-ducat or not, seeing he has queues (not upon ducats) in his hands
every day.” The pickle-herring of Kuhschnappel didn’t vouchsafe the ghost
of a smile at this. The hairdresser came, and declared it to be a queue, and
civilly took it away himself to get it changed. Hairdressers can run; in five
minutes he brought the change for the ducat.
When the melancholy buffoon had pocketed his portion of it, Lenette’s
face was all over double interjections and marks of interrogation; wherefore
Siebenkæs resumed his midday sermon. “The principal prizes,” he said,
“are pewter dishes and sums of money for hitting the bird, and mostly
provisions for the other marks we shoot at. I suspect that you and I shall
dine on St. Andrew’s Day upon a nice piece of roast meat in a new dish,
both of which I shall have shot into your kitchen, if I only take a little pains.
And at all events don’t worry yourself, darling, because our money’s nearly
all gone. Take refuge behind me. I am your sandbag, your gabion, your
shelter trench, and with my rifle, more certainly still with my pen, I feel
pretty sure I shall keep the devil of poverty at his distance, till my precious
guardian hands over my mother’s property. Only for God’s sake don’t let
your work interrupt mine. Your rag and your besom have cost me at least

sixteen currency dollars this morning. For supposing I get eight imperial
dollars a printed sheet for my Devilish Papers (counting the imperial dollar
at ninety kreuzer)—and I ought, to get more—I should have earned forty-
eight currency dollars this morning if I had written a (printed) sheet and a
half. But you see I had to stop in the middle of it and expend a great many
words upon you, for none of which I get a single kreuzer. You should look
upon me as a fat old spider stowed away in a box to shrivel up in time into a
precious gold nugget or jewel. Whenever I take a dip of ink I draw a thread
of gold out of the ink bottle, as I’ve often told you, and (as the proverb
says) the morning hours have gold in their mouths (Morgenstund hat Gold
im Mund). Go on with your dinner, and listen. I’ll just take this opportunity
of explaining to you the principal points in which the preciousness of an
author consists, and so give you the key to a good many things. In Swabia,
in Saxony, and Pomerania, there are towns in which there are people who
appraise authors as our master butcher here does beef. They are usually
known by the name of tasters or rulers of taste, because they try the flavour
of every book as it comes out, and then tell the people whether they’ll like it
or not. We authors in our irritation often call these people critics, but they
might bring an action against us for libel for so doing. Now as these
directors of taste seldom write books themselves, they have all the more
time to read and find fault with other people’s. Yet it does sometimes
happen that some of them have written bad books themselves, and
consequently know a bad book in a moment when they come across one.
Many become patron saints of authors and of their books for the same
reason that St. John Nepomuck became the patron saint of bridges and those
who cross them; because he was once thrown off one into the water. Now
these scribblings of mine will be sent to these gentlemen as soon as they are
in print (as your hymn-book is). And they’ll peer all through my
productions to see whether or not I’ve written them quite legibly and
distinctly (not too large or too small), whether I’ve put any wrong letters, a
little e for a big, or an f instead of a ph, whether the hyphen-strokes are too
long or too short, and all that sort of thing: indeed they often even give
opinions about the thoughts in the book (which they have nothing to do
with). Now you see, if you go on scrubbing and swishing about with
besoms behind me, I shall keep writing all sorts of stuff and nonsense, and
it’ll all be printed. Of course that’s a terrible thing to happen to a man, for
these tasters tear great frightful holes and wounds in the paper however fine

it is, with nails as long as fingers (buttonmakers’ nails are shorter, but not
circumcisers’ among the Jews), before they give it a name to carry about
with it, as the circumcisers do to the Jew boys. And after this, they circulate
a slip of unsized paper, in which they find fault with me, and give me a bad
name, all over the empire, in Saxony and Pomerania, and tell all Swabia in
so many plain words that I’m an ass. May the devil confound their
impertinence! This is the sort of birching, you see, that besom of yours will
be getting me in for. Whereas, if I write beautifully and legibly, and with
proper attention and ability—and every sheet of my Devilish Papers is so
written—if I carefully weigh and consider every word and every page
before I write it, if I am playful in one place, instructive in another, pleasing
in all,—in that case I am bound to tell you, Lenette, that the tasters are
people who are quite capable of appreciating work of that sort, and would
think nothing of sitting down and circulating papers in which the least they
would say of me would be that I had certainly brought something away
from college in my head, and had a little to show for my studies. In short,
they would say, they hadn’t expected it of me, and there was really
something in me. Now a panegyric of this kind upon a husband is reflected,
of course, upon his wife, and when the Augspurg people are all asking
‘Where does he live, this Siebenkæs whom everybody’s talking of?’ there
are sure to be lots of folks in the Fuggery to answer, ‘Oh! he lives in
Kuhschnappel, his wife was a daughter of Engelkraut, the senate clerk, and
a very good wife she is to him.’”
“You’ve told me all that about bookmaking hundreds of times,” she
answered. “And it’s just what the bookbinder says too; and I am sure he has
all the best books through his hands, binding them.”
This allusion to his repetitions of himself, though not meant ill-
temperedly, he didn’t very much relish. In fact, the habit had hitherto been,
as it were, incubating unperceived in him, as a fever does in its early stage.
Husbands, even those who are sage and of few words, talk to their wives
with the same boundless liberty and unrestraint as they do to their own
selves; and a man repeats himself to himself immeasurably oftener than to
anybody else, and that without so much as observing that he does it, let
alone taking any count of how often. The wife, however, both observes and
counts; accustomed as she is to hear the cleverest (and most unintelligible)
remarks from her husband’s lips daily, she can’t help remembering them
when they occur again.

The hairdresser reappeared unexpectedly, bringing a fleeting cloud with
him. He said he had been to all the poor devils in the house to see if he
could get as much of the Martinmas rent out of them in advance as would
pay his subscription to the shooting match, but that they were a set of
church mice and he hadn’t succeeded. The whole garrison of them were
naturally unequal to the payment of an impost of this description six whole
weeks before it was due, inasmuch as the majority of them didn’t see how
they were to pay it when it was due. So the Saxon came to the grandee of
his house, to the “Lord of Ducats” as he styled the advocate. Siebenkæs
couldn’t find in his heart to disappoint the patient soul with another “no” on
the top of those he had borne so good-humouredly; his wife and he scraped
together the little small change they had left out of the ducat, and sent him
away rejoicing with half of the rent, three gulden. All they had left for
themselves was—the question what they should do for light in the evening;
for there weren’t even a couple of groschen in the house to get half a pound
of candles, and there were no candles in natura.
I cannot say that he here turned deadly pale, or fainted, or began to rave.
Praise be to every manly soul who has drunk the icy whey of stoicism for
only half a spring, and does not fall down paralysed and frozen, like a
woman, before the chill spectre of penury. In an age which has had all its
strongest sinews cut through except the universal one, money, any diatribe,
even the most extravagant, against riches, is nobler and more useful than
the most accurately just depreciation of poverty. For pasquinades on gold
dirt are agreeable to the rich, reminding them that though their riches may
take to themselves wings, true happiness does not depend thereon; while the
poor derive from them not bitterer feeling merely, but also the sweeter
satisfaction of conquering the same. All that is base in man—thoughts,
fancies, what we look on as being examples—all join in one chorus in
praise of gold; why should we desire to deprive poverty of her true reserve
force, her chevaliers d’honneur, philosophy and beggars’ pride?
The first thing Siebenkæs opened was not his mouth, but the door, and
then the pewter cupboard in the kitchen, from which he carefully and with a
good deal of gravity took down a bell-shaped tureen and three pewter
plates, and put them on a chair. Lenette could no longer stand by in silence;
she clasped her hands and said in a faint voice of shame, “Merciful
Providence! is it come to selling our dishes?”

“I’m only going to turn them into silver,” he said; “as kings make church
bells into dollars, so shall we make our bell-dishes into coin. There’s
nothing you need be ashamed about in converting trash of table ware, the
coffins of beasts, into currency, when Duke Christian of Brunswick turned a
king’s silver coffin into dollars in 1662. Is a plate an apostle, do you think?
Great monarchs have taken many an apostle, if he happened to be a silver
one, Hugo of St. Caro and others as well, divided them (as it were) into
chapters, verses, and legends, sent them to the mint, and then dispatched
them off all over the world in that analysed form.”
“Ah! stupid nonsense,” she answered.
Some few readers will probably say “What else was it?” and I ought long
ago to have apologized, perhaps, for the style of speech, so
incomprehensible to Lenette, which the advocate makes use of.
He justified it satisfactorily to himself by the consideration that his wife
always had some DISTANT idea of what he was talking about, even when
he made use of the most learned technical expressions, and the farthest-
fetched plays upon words, because of its being good practice, and of his
liking to hear himself do it. “Women,” he would repeat, “have a distant and
dim comprehension of all these things, and therefore don’t waste, in long
tedious efforts to discover the precise signification of these
unintelligibilities, precious time which might be better employed.” This, I
may observe, is not much encouragement for Reinhold’s ‘Lexicon to Jean
Paul’s Levana,’ nor for me personally either, in some senses.
“Ah! stuff and nonsense” had been Lenette’s answer. Firmian merely
asked her to bring the pewter into the sitting-room, and he would talk the
matter over sensibly. But he might as well have set forth his reasons before
a woman’s skin stuffed with straw. What she chiefly blamed him for, was
that by his contribution to the shooting-club purse he had emptied hers. And
thus she herself suggested to him the best answer he could have made. He
said, “It was an angel that put it in my head; because on St. Andrew’s Day I
shall regain everything that I turn into silver now, and repewterise it
immediately. To please you, I shall keep not only the tureen and the plates I
get as prizes, but all the rest of the pewter ware, and put it all into your
cupboard. I assure you I had made up my mind before to sell all my prizes.”
What was to be done, then? There was no help for it. This banished and
expatriated table ware was lowered in the darkness of evening into old

Sabel’s basket—and she was celebrated all over the town for transacting
this sort of commission agency or transfer business, with as discreet a
silence as if she were dealing in stolen gold. “Nobody gets it out of me,” she
would say, “whose the things are. The treasurer, who’s dead and gone poor
man—you know I sold everything he had in the world for him—he often
used to say there was never the equal of me.”
But, my poor dear young couple, I fear this Sabbath[40] or “Descent of
the Saviour into Hades” is but little likely to help you long, in that
antechamber of hell which you’ve got into. The flames are gone from about
you to-day, certainly, and a cool sea-breeze is refreshing you, but tomorrow
and the day after the old smoke and the old fire will be blazing at your
hearts! However, I don’t want to put any restrictions upon your trade in tin.
We’re quite right to have a good dinner to-day though we know perfectly
well we shall be just every bit as hungry to-morrow again.
So the next morning Siebenkæs begged that he might be allowed to be all
the quieter that day because he had been obliged to talk so much the day
before. Our dear Lenette, who was a live washing-machine and scouring-
mill, and in whose eyes the washing bill and the bill of fare had much of the
weight of a confessor’s certificate, would sooner have let go her hold of
everything in the world—her husband included—than of the duster and the
besom. She thought this was merely his obstinate persistency, whereas it
was really her own, in blowing the organ bellows and thundering away
upon her pedal reed stops right behind her author’s back during the morning
hours, whose mouths had two kinds of gold in them for him, namely gold
from the golden age, and ordinary metallic gold. She might have played
with a thirty-two feet stop out in the afternoon as long as she liked, but she
wasn’t to be got out of her usual daily routine. A woman is the most
heterogeneous compound of obstinate will and self-sacrifice that I have
ever met with; she would let her head be cut off by the headsman of Paris
for her husband’s sake, very likely, but not a single hair of it. And she can
deny herself to almost any extent for others’ good, but not one bit for her
own. She can forego sleep for three nights running for a sick person, but not
one minute of a nap before bed-time, to ensure herself a better night’s sleep
in bed. Neither the souls of the blest, nor butterflies, though neither of them
possess stomachs, can eat less than a woman going to a ball or to her
wedding, or than one cooking for her guests; but if it’s only her doctor and

her own health that forbid her some Esau’s mess or other, she eats it that
instant. Now men’s sacrifices are all just turned the opposite way.
Lenette, impelled by two imposing forces, what she was asked to do and
what she wanted to do, tried to find the feminine line of the resultant, and
hit upon the middle course of stopping her scouring and sweeping as long
as he was sitting at his writing. But the moment he got up, and went to the
piano for a couple of minutes, or to the window, or across the doorstep, that
instant back she would bring her washing and scrubbing instruments of
torture into the room again. Siebenkæs wasn’t long in becoming cognisant
of this terrible alternation and relieving-of-the-guard between her besom
and his (satirical) one; and the way she watched and lay in wait for his
movements drove all the ideas in his head higgledy-piggledy. At first he
bore it with really very great patience, as great as ever a husband has,
patience, that is, which lasts for a short time. But after reflecting for a
considerable period in silence, that the public, as well as he, were sufferers
by this room-cleaning business, and that all posterity was, in a manner,
watching and hanging upon every stroke of that besom, which might do its
work just as well in the afternoon when he would only be at his law papers
—the tumour of his anger suddenly broke, and he grew mad, i. e. madder
than he was before, and ran up to her and cried—
“Oh! this is the very devil! At it again, eh! I see what you’re about. You
watch till I get up from the table! Just be kind enough to finish me off at
once; hunger and worry will kill me before Easter, whether or not. Good
God! It’s a thing I really can not comprehend. She sees as well as possible
that my book is our larder—that there are whole rations of bread in every
page of it—yet she holds my hands the entire morning, so that I can’t do a
line of it. Here I’ve been sitting on the nest all this time and only hatched as
far as letter E, where I describe the ascent of Justice to heaven. Oh! Lenette!
Lenette!”
“Very well,” said Lenette, “it’s all the same whatever I do, it’s sure to be
wrong; do let me tidy the house properly, like any other woman.”
And she asked him, in a simple manner, why it was that the bookbinder’s
little boy (the language is mine, not hers), who played fantasias the whole
day long upon a child’s toy fiddle, composing and enjoying whole
Alexander’s Feasts upon it, didn’t disturb him with his screeching
unharmonical progressions—and how he bore the chimneysweep’s

sweeping the other day so much better than he did her sweeping of the
room. And as he couldn’t quite manage to condense, just in a moment, into
few words the demonstration of the magnitude of the difference which
existed between these things, he found it better to get into a rage again, and
say—
“Do you suppose I’m going to make a great long speech and explanation
gratis, and lose dollar after dollar at my work? Himmel! Kreuz! Wetter! The
municipal code, the Roman pandects, forbid a coppersmith even to enter a
street where a professor is working, and here’s my own wife harder than an
old jurist—and not only that—she’s the coppersmith herself. I’ll tell you
what it is, Lenette, I shall really speak to the Schulrath about this.” This did
a great deal of service.
The produce of the Trinity dollar here arrived before the Schulrath; a
piece of polite attention which no one would have expected from a man of
so much learning and knowledge. No doubt all my readers will be as much
delighted as if they were husbands of Lenette themselves at the fact that she
was a perfect angel all the afternoon; her hands made no more noise at their
work than her fingers or her needle; she even put off the doing of several
things which were not necessary. She accompanied a sister in the oratorical
art, who came in with a divine bonnet (in her hands, to be altered), all the
way down stairs, not so much out of politeness as thoughtfulness, that all
the points of principal importance connected with the doing up of the
bonnet, which had already been settled, might be gone over again two or
three times out of the advocate’s hearing.
This touched the old noise-hunter, and went to the weak and tender spot
in him, his heart. He sought long in himself for a fitting thank-offering in
return, till he at last hit upon quite a new sort of one.
“Listen, child,” he said, taking her hand very affectionately; “wouldn’t it
be more reasonable in me if I were to amuse myself with my writing in the
evening? I mean, if the husband were to do his creating at a time when the
wife had no washing to do. Just think what a life of nectar and ambrosia
that would be; we should sit opposite to each other with a candle between
us—you at your sewing, I at my writing—the other people in the house
would all have their work done and be at their beer—of course there
wouldn’t be customers with bonnets coming at that time of night to make
themselves visible and audible. The evenings will be getting longer too, and

of course I shall have the more time for my writing fun, but we need say
nothing about that now. What do you think, or what do you say (if you like
the expression better), to this new style of life? Remember too, that we’re
quite rich again now—the Russian Trinity dollar is like so much found
money.”
“Oh! it will be delightful,” she said, “I shall be able to do all my
household work in the morning, as a proper reasonable housekeeper
should.”
“Yes, just so,” he answered, “I shall write away quietly at my satires all
morning, then wait till evening, and go on where I left off.”
The evening of nectar and ambrosia came duly on, and was quite without
a rival among all evenings that had gone before it. A young married couple,
sitting one on each side of a table, working away quietly at their work, with
a candle between them, have a considerable notion what happiness is. He
was all happy thoughts and kisses; she all smiles, and what little noise she
made with the frying-pan seemed no louder to him than what she made with
her needle. “When people are earning double working-pay by the light of
one candle,” he said, greatly delighted at the domestic reformation, “they
needn’t, as far as I see, restrict themselves to a miserable dip, the thickness
of a worm, which they can see nothing by, unless it be the wretchedness of
its own light. To-morrow we’ll set up a mould candle, and no more about
it.”
As I take some credit to myself for selecting for narration in this story
such events only as are of universal interest, it will be sufficient cursorily to
mention that the mould candle duly appeared next evening, and kindled a
feeble strife, because, apropos of this candle, the advocate once more
brought forward a new theory of his, concerning the lighting of candles. He
held the somewhat schismatic opinion that the rational way of lighting all
candles, more particularly thick ones, was to light them at the thick end, and
not at the top or thin end; and that this was the reason of there being two
wicks projecting from every candle. “A law of combustion,” he would add,
“in support of which I need only refer (at least for women of sense) to the
self-evident truth that, when a candle is burning down, it keeps growing
larger and larger at its lower extremity—just as people who are burning
down from debauchery grow thicker at theirs, with fat and dropsy. If we
light the candle at the top, we find the result to be a useless lump, plug, or

stump of tallow running all over our candlestick. Whereas, if we light it at
the bottom, the liquefied grease from the thick end wraps itself gradually
and with the most exquisite symmetry all over the thinner end as if feeding
it, and equalising its proportions.”
In reply to which, Lenette, with some force, adduced Shaftesbury’s
touchstone of truth, ridicule. “Why, everybody that came in of an evening,
and noticed that I had put my candle upside down in the candlestick, would
burst out laughing; and it would be the wife that everybody would blame.”
So that a mutual treaty of peace had to put a period to this battle of the
candle, to the effect that he should light his candle at the bottom, and she
hers at the top. And for the present, as the candle common to both parties
happened to be thick at the top, he agreed to admit, without objection, the
erroneous method of lighting.
However, the Devil, who crosses and blesses himself at such treaties of
peace, managed so to play his cards, that on this very day Siebenkæs
chanced, in his reading, to come upon the touching anecdote of the younger
Pliny’s wife holding the lamp for her husband that he might see to write.
And it occurred to him that, now that he was getting along so swimmingly
with his selection from the said Devil’s Papers, it would be a splendid
arrangement, and save him many interruptions, if Lenette would snuff the
candle always instead of his doing it himself.
“Of course,” said she, “I shall be delighted.” The first fifteen or twenty
minutes passed, and everything seemed to be all right.
The above period having elapsed, he cocked up his chin towards the
candle, by way of reminder to her to snuff it. Next, he gently touched the
snuffers with the tip of his pen, with the like object, not saying anything
however; and a little while after that, he moved the candlestick a little bit,
and said softly, “The candle.” Matters now began to assume a more serious
aspect; he began to observe and watch with greater attention the gradual
obscuration of his paper, and consequently the very snuffers which, in
Lenette’s hands, had promised to throw so much light on his labours,
became the means of impeding his progress quite as effectually as the crabs
did Hercules in his battle with the hydra. The two wretched ideas, “snuff”
and “snuffers,” took bodily shape, and danced hand in hand, with a
sprightly pertness up and down on every letter of his most biting satires.

“Lenette,” he had soon to say again, “please to amputate that stupid black
stump there, on both our accounts.”
“Dear me, have I been forgetting it?” she said, and snuffed it in a great
hurry.
Readers of a historical turn—such as I should wish mine to be—can now
see that things couldn’t but get worse and worse, and more and more out of
joint. He had often to stop, making letters a yard or so in length, waiting till
some beneficent hand should remove the black thorn from the rose of light,
till, at length, he broke out with the word “Snuff!” Then he took to varying
his verbs, saying, “Enlighten!” or “Behead!” or “Nip-off.” Or he
endeavoured to introduce an agreeable variety by using other forms of
speech, such as “The candle’s cap, Capmaker;” “There’s a long spot in the
sun again;” or, “This is a charming chiaroscuro, well adapted for night
thoughts in a beautiful Correggio-night; but snuff away all the same.”
At last, shortly before supper, when the charcoal stack in the flame had
really attained a great height, he inhaled half a river of air into his lungs,
and, slowly dropping it out again, said, in a grimly mild manner, “You don’t
snuff a bit—as far as I can see, the black funereal pyre might rise up to the
ceiling for all you would care. All right! I prefer to be the candle-snuffer of
this theatre myself till supper-time; and while we’re at supper I shall just
say to you, as a rational man, what there is to say on the subject.” “Oh! yes,
please,” she said, quite delighted.
When she had set four eggs on the table, two for each, he commenced:
“You see, I had been looking forward to my working at night being attended
with several advantages, because I thought you would have managed this
easy little task of snuffing the candle always at the right time, as a Roman
lady of high rank made herself do duty as a candlestick for her celebrated
husband, Pliny junior (to use a commercial expression), and held his light
for him. I was mistaken, it appears; for, unfortunately, I can’t write with my
toes under the table, like a person with no arms, nor yet in the dark, as a
clairvoyant might. The only use the candle is to me, in the circumstances, is
that it serves as an Epictetus lamp, enabling me to get some practice in
stoicism. It had often as much as twelve inches of eclipse, like a sun, and I
wished in vain, darling, for an invisible eclipse—such as frequently occurs
in the heavens. The cursed slag of our candle hatches just these obscure
ideas and gloomy night thoughts, which authors (too) often have. Whereas,

gracious goodness! if you had only snuffed, as you ought to have done
——”
“You’re in fun, are you not?” she asked. “My stitches are much smaller
than your strokes, and I’m sure I saw quite well.”
“Well, dear,” he continued, “I’ll proceed to point out to you that, on the
grounds of psychology and mental science, it isn’t that it matters a bit
whether a person who is writing and thinking sees a little more or less
distinctly or not, it’s the snuffers and the snuff that he can’t get out of his
head, and they get behind his spiritual legs, trip up his ideas, and stop him,
just as a log does a horse hobbled to it. For even when you’ve only just
snuffed the candle, and I’m in the full enjoyment of the light, I begin to
look out for the instant when you’ll do it next. Now, this watching being in
itself neither visible nor audible, can be nothing but a thought, or idea; and
as every thought has the property of occupying the mind to the exclusion of
all others, it follows that all an author’s other and more valuable ideas are
sent at once to the dogs. But this is by no means the worst of the affair. I, of
course, ought not to have had to occupy my head with the idea of candle-
snuffing any more than with that of snuff-taking; but when the ardently
longed-for snuffing never comes off at all, the black smut on the ripe ear of
light keeps growing longer—the darkness deepening—a regular funereal
torch feebly casting its ray upon a half-dead writer, who can’t drive from
his head the thought of the conjugal hand which could snap all the fetters
asunder with one single snip;—then, my dearest Lenette, it’s not easy for
the said writer to help writing like an ass, and stamping like a dromedary.
At least, I express my own opinion and experience on the subject!”
On this, she assured him that, if he were really serious, she would take
great care to do it properly next evening.
And, in truth, this story must give her credit for keeping her word, for she
not only snuffed much oftener than the night before, but, the fact is, she
hardly ever left off snuffing, particularly after he had nodded his head once
or twice by way of thanks.
“Don’t snuff too often, darling,” he said, at length, but very, very kindly.
“If you attempt too fine sub-sub-subdivisions (fractions of fractions of
fractions of fractions) of the wick, it’ll be almost as bad as ever—a candle
snuffed too short gives as little light as one with an overgrown wick which
you may apply to the lights of the world and of the Church, that’s to say if

you can. It’s only for a short while before and after the snuffing, entre chien
et loup as it were, that that delicious middle-age of the soul prevails when it
can see to perfection; when it is truly a life for the gods, a just proportion of
black and white, both in the candle and on the book.”
I and others really do not see any great reason to congratulate ourselves
upon this new turn of events. The poor’s advocate has evidently laid upon
himself the additional burden, that all the time he is writing he has to keep
watching and calculating,—superficially perhaps, but still, watching and
calculating—the mean term, or middle-distance, between the long wick and
the short. And what time has he left for his work?
Some minutes after, when the snuffing came a little too soon, he asked,
though somewhat doubtfully, “Dirty clothes for the wash already?” Next
time, as she let it be almost too long before she snuffed, he looked at her
interrogatively, and said, “Well? well?”
“In one instant,” said she. By-and-by, he having got rather more deeply
absorbed than usual in his writing, and she in her work, he found, when he
suddenly came to himself and looked, one of the longest spears in the
candle that had yet appeared, and with two or three thieves round it to the
bargain.
“Oh, good Lord! ’Pon my soul, this is really the life of a dog!” cried he;
and, seizing the snuffers in a fury, he snuffed the candle—out.
This holiday pause of darkness afforded a capital opportunity for jumping
up, flying into a passion, and pointing out to Lenette more in detail how it
was that she plagued and tormented him, however admirably he might have
arranged things; and, like all women, had neither rhyme nor reason in her
ways of doing things, always snuffing either too close or not close enough.
She, however, lighted the candle without saying a word, and he got into a
greater rage than before, and demanded to be informed whether he had ever
as yet asked anything of her but the merest trifles possible to conceive, and
if anybody but his own wedded wife would have hesitated for a moment to
attend to them. “Just answer me,” he said.
She did not answer him; she set the freshly-lighted candle on the table,
and tears were in her eyes. It was the first time he had caused her a tear,
since her marriage. In a moment, like a person magnetised, he saw and
diagnosed all that was diseased and unhealthy in his system; and, on the
spot, he cast out the old Adam, and shied him contemptuously away into a

corner. This was an easy task for him; his heart was always so open to love
and justice, that the moment these goddesses came into view, the tone of
anger with which he had commenced a sentence would fall into gentle
melody before he reached the end of it; he could stop his battle-axe in the
middle of its stroke.
So that a household peace was here concluded, the instruments thereof
being one pair of moist eyes and one pair of bright kind ones; and a
Westphalia treaty of peace accorded one candle to each party, with absolute
freedom of snuffing.
But the peace was soon embittered, inasmuch as Penia, goddess of
poverty (who has thousands of invisible churches all about the country,
where most houses are her tabernacles and lazar cells), began to make
manifest her bodily presence and her all-controlling power. There was no
more money in the house. But, rather than place his honour and his freedom
in pledge, and incur obligations which he had less and less prospect of
repaying—I mean, rather than borrow—he would have sold all he had, and
himself into the bargain, like the old German. It is said, the national debt of
England, if counted out in dollars, would make a ring round the earth, like a
second equator; however, I have not as yet measured this nose-ring of the
British Lion, this annular eclipse, or halo, round the sun of Britain, myself.
But I know that Siebenkæs would have considered a negative money-girdle
of this sort about his waist to be a penance-belt stuck full of spines, or an
iron ring, such as people who tow boats have on; a girdle compressing the
heart in a fatal manner. Even supposing he were to borrow, and then stop
payment, as nations and banking-houses do—a catastrophe which debtors
and aristocratic persons, who have their wits about them, manage to avoid
without difficulty, by the simple expedient of never beginning payment—
yet, having only one friend whom he could convert into a creditor (Stiefel),
he couldn’t possibly have seen this dear friend, who was in the first rank of
his spiritual creditors already, figuring in the fifth rank, or that of the
unpaid. He therefore avoided such a two-fold transgression as this would
have been—a sin against both friendship and honour—by pledging things
of less value, namely, household furniture.
He went back (but alone) to the pewter cupboard in the kitchen, and
peeped through the rail to see whether there were two ranks of dishes or
three. Alas! there wag but one rear-rank man of a plate standing behind his

front-rank man, like double notes of interrogation. He marched the rear-
rank man to the front accordingly, and gave him for travelling companions
and fellow-refugees a herring-dish, a sauce-boat, and a salad-bowl. Having
effected this reduction of his army, he extended the remaining troops so as
to occupy a wider front, and subdivided the three large gaps into twenty
small ones. He then moved these disbanded soldiers to the sitting-room, and
went and called Lenette, who was in the bookbinder’s room.
“I’ve been looking at our pewter cupboard for the last five or ten
minutes,” he said. “I really shouldn’t have noticed, if I hadn’t known it, that
I had taken away the tureen and the plates. Should you?”
“Ah, indeed, I do notice it every day of my life,” she declared.
Here, however, being rather uneasy at the idea of what might be the result
of too long an inspection, he hurried her into the sitting-room, where the
dishes were which he had just taken out, and made known his intention of
transposing, like a clever musician, this quartett from the key of pewter into
that of silver. He proposed the selling of them, that she might be got to
agree the more easily to their being pawned. But she pulled out every stop
of the feminine organ, the clarion, the stopped diapason, flute, bird-stop,
vox humana, and, lastly, the tremolo stop. He might say whatever he liked;
she said whatever she liked. A man does not try to arrest the iron arm of
necessity, or to avert it; he calmly awaits its stroke; a woman tries to
struggle away from its grip, at any rate for a few hours, before it encircles
her. It was in vain that Siebenkæs quietly and simply asked her if she knew
what else was to be done. To questions of this sort, there float up and down
in women’s heads not one complete answer, but thousands of half answers,
which are supposed to amount to a whole one, just as in the differential
calculus an infinite number of straight lines go to form a curved one. Some
of these unripe, half-formed, fugitive, mutually auxiliary answers were——
“He shouldn’t have changed his name, and he would have had his
mother’s money by this time.”
“Of course, he might borrow.”
“Look at all his clients, well off and comfortable, and he won’t ask them
to pay him.”
“He never dreams of asking a fee for defending the infanticide.”

“And he shouldn’t spend so much money.” “He needn’t have paid that
half-term’s rent in advance.” For the latter would have kept him going for a
day or two, you see!
It is always a vain task to oppose the “minority of one” of the complete
and true answer to the immense majority of feminine partial proofs of this
sort; women know, at any rate, thus much of the law of Switzerland, that
four half or invalid witnesses outweigh one whole or valid one.[41] But the
best way of confuting them is, to let them say what they have got to say,
and not utter a word yourself; they’re certain to diverge, before very long,
into subsidiary or accessory matters, which you yield to them, confuting
them, as regards the real subject of argument, simply by action. This is the
only species of confutation which they ever forgive. Siebenkæs,
unfortunately, attempted to apply the surgical bandage of philosophy to
Lenette’s two principal members, her head and her heart, and therefore
commenced as follows—
“Dear wife, in the parish church you sing against worldly riches, like the
rest of the congregation, and yet you have them fixed on your heart as
firmly as your brooch. Now, I don’t go to a church, it’s true, but I have a
pulpit in my own breast, and I prize one single happy moment more than
the whole of this pewter dirt. Tell me truly now, has your immortal heart
been pained by the tragical fate of the soup-tureen, or was it only your
pericardium? The doctors prescribe tin, in powder, for worms; and may not
this miserable tin, which we have broken into little pieces and swallowed,
have had a similar effect on the abominable worms of the heart? Collect
yourself, and think of our cobbler here, does his soup taste any the worse to
him out of his painted iron saucière because his bit of roast meat is eaten
out of it too? You sit behind that pincushion of yours, and can’t see that
society is mad, and drinks coffee, tea, and chocolate out of different cups,
and has particular kinds of plates for fruit, for salad, and for herrings, and
particular sorts of dishes for hares, fish, and poultry. And I say that it will
get madder and madder as time goes on, and order as many kinds of fruit
plates from the china shops as there are different fruits in the gardens—at
least, I should do it myself; and if I were a crown prince, or a grand master,
I should insist upon having lark dishes and lark knives, snipe dishes and
snipe knives; neither would I carve the haunch of a stag of sixteen upon any
plate I had once had a stag of eight upon. The world is a fine madhouse, and
one gets up and preaches his false doctrine in it when another has done, just

as they do in a Quaker meeting. So the Bedlamites think that only two
follies are veritable follies, follies which are past, and follies which are yet
to come—old follies and new; but I would show them that theirs partake of
the nature of both.”
Lenette’s only reply was an inexpressibly gentle request: “Oh! please,
Firmian, do not sell the pewter.”
“Very well, then, I shan’t!” (he answered, with a bitter satirical joy at
having got the brilliant neck of the pigeon fairly into the noose which he
had so long had ready baited for it). “The emperor Antoninus sent his real
silver plate to the mint, so that I might surely send mine; but just as you
like: I don’t care twopence. Not an ounce of it shall be old; I shall merely
pawn! I’m much obliged to you for the suggestion; and if I only hit the
eagle’s tail on St. Andrew’s Day, or the imperial globe, I can redeem the
whole of it in a minute—I mean with the money of the prize; at all events,
the salad-bowl and the soup-tureen. I think you’re quite right. Old Sabel’s
in the house, is she not? She can take the things and bring back the money.”
She let it be so now. The shooting-match on St. Andrew’s Day was her
Fortunatus’s wishing-cap, the wooden wings of the eagle were as waxen
flying-apparatus fixed on to her hopes, the powder and shot were the
flower-seeds of her future blossoms of peace (as they are to crowned heads
also). Thou poor soul, in many senses of the word! But the poor hope
incredibly more than the rich; therefore it is that poor devils are more apt to
catch the infection of lotteries than the rich—just as they are to catch the
plague and other epidemics.
Siebenkæs—who looked down with contempt not only on the loss of his
household goods, but on the loss of his money—was secretly resolved to
leave the trash at the pawnbroker’s, unredeemed for ever, like a state-bond,
even though he should chance to be king (at the shooting-match), and
convert the transaction into a regular sale some future day, when he
happened to be passing the shop.
After a few bright quiet days Peltzstiefel came again to make an evening
call. Amid the manifold embargoes laid upon their supplies, the risks
attending their smuggling operations, and as a tear or a sigh was laid as a
tax which must necessarily be paid upon every loaf of bread, Firmian had
had no time, to say nothing of inclination, to remember his jealousy. In
Lenette’s case, matters were necessarily exactly reversed; and if she really

has any love for Stiefel, it must grow faster on his money-dunghill than on
the advocate’s field all over wells of hunger. The Schulrath’s eye was not
one of those which read the troubles of a household in a minute, though
they are masked by smiling faces; he noticed nothing of the kind. And for
that very reason it came to pass that this friendly trio spent a happy hour
free from clouds, during which, though the sun of happiness did not shine,
yet the moon of happiness (hope and memory) rose shimmering in their sky.
Moreover, Siebenkæs had the enjoyment of being provided with a
cultivated listener, who could follow and appreciate the jingle of the bells
on the jester’s cap, the trumpet fanfares of his Leibgeberish sallies. Lenette
could neither follow nor appreciate them in the very least, and even
Peltzstiefel didn’t understand him when he read him, but only when he
heard him talk. The two men at first talked only of persons, not of things, as
women do; only that they called their chronique scandaleuse by the name of
History of Literature and Men of Letters. For literary men like to know
every little trait and peculiarity of a great author—what clothes he wears,
and what his favourite dishes are. For similar reasons, women minutely
observe every little trait and peculiarity of any crown princess who happens
to pass through the town, even to her ribbons and fringes. From literary men
they passed to scholarship; and then all the clouds of this life melted away,
and in the land of learning, the fair realm of science, the downcast
sorrowful head, wrapped and veiled in the black Lenten altar-cloth of
hardship and privation, is lifted up once more. The soul inhales the
mountain air of its native land, and looks down from the lofty peak of
Pindus upon its poor bruised and wounded body lying beneath—that body
which it has to drag and bear about, sighing under its weight. When some
dunned, needy scholar, some skin-and-bone reading-master, a poor curate
with five children, or a baited and badgered tutor, is lying woeful and
wretched—every nerve quivering under some instrument of torture—and a
brother of his craft, plagued by just as many instruments of torture as
himself, comes and argues and philosophises with him a whole evening,
and tells him all the latest opinions of the literary papers, then truly the
sand-glass which marks the hours of the torture[42] is laid on its side—
Orpheus comes, all bright and shining, with the lyre of knowledge in his
hand, into the psychic hell of the two brethren in office, the sad tears vanish
from their brightening eyes, the snakes of the furies twine into graceful
curls, the Ixion’s wheel rolls harmoniously to the lyre, and these two poor

Sisyphuses sit resting quietly on their stones and listen to the music. But the
poor curate’s, the reading-master’s, the scholar’s, good wife, what is her
comfort in her misery? She has none except her husband, who ought,
therefore, to be very tender to all her shortcomings.
The reader was made aware in the first book that Leibgeber had sent
three programmes from Bayreuth. Stiefel brought the one, by Dr. Frank,
with him, and asked Siebenkæs to write a notice of it for the ‘Kuhschnappel
Heavenly Messenger.’ He also took out of his pocket another little book, to
receive its sentence. The reader will hail both these works with gladness,
seeing that my hero and his has no money in the house, and will be able to
live for a day or two by reviewing them. The second manuscript, which was
in a roll, was entitled: ‘Lessingii, Emilia Galotti. Pro gymnasmatis loco
latine reddita et publice acta, moderante J. H. Steffens. Cellis 1788.’
It seems that a good many of the subscribers to the ‘Heavenly
Messenger’ have complained of the length of time which elapsed before
this work was noticed, drawing disadvantageous comparisons between the
‘Messenger’ and the ‘Universal German Library;’ for the latter,
notwithstanding the greatness of its universal German circulation, notices
good works within a few years of their birth—sometimes even as early as
the third year of their existence—so that the favourable notice can
frequently be bound up with the work, the first paper-covers of it not being
worn out before. The reason, however, why the ‘Heavenly Messenger’ did
not, and in fact could not, review more of the books of the year 1788, was,
that it was not until five years after that date that it—first saw the light
itself.
“Don’t you think,” said Siebenkæs, in a friendly manner to Peltzstiefel,
“that if I’m going to write proper notices of Messrs. Frank and Steffens
here, my wife should take care not to make a thundering noise, swishing
away with her broom at my back?”
“That might really be a matter of very considerable importance,” said
Stiefel, gravely. Upon which a playful and somewhat abridged report of the
proceedings in the household action of inhibition was laid before him.
Wendeline fixed her kindly eyes on Peltzstiefel’s face, striving to read the
Rubrum (the red title), and the Nigrum (the black body matter) of his
judgment there before it was pronounced. Both colours were there. But

though Stiefel’s bosom heaved with genuine sighs of the deepest affection
for her, he nevertheless addressed her as follows—
“Madame Siebenkæs, this really won’t do at all; for God hath not created
anything nobler than a scholar sitting at his writing. Hundreds of thousands
of people, ten times told, are sitting in every quarter of the globe, as if on
school-forms before him, and to all of these he has to speak. Errors held by
the wisest and cleverest people he has to eradicate: ages, long since gone to
dust and passed away, with those who lived in them, he has to describe with
accuracy and minuteness; systems, the most profound and the most
complex, he has to confute and overthrow, or otherwise to invent and
establish, himself. His light has to pierce through massy crowns, through
the Pope’s triple tiara, through Capuchin hoods and through wreaths of
laurel—to pierce them all and enlighten the brains within. This is his work;
and this work he can perform. But Madame Siebenkæs, what a strain on his
faculties! What a grand sustained effort is necessary! It is a hard matter and
a difficult to set up a book in type, but harder still to write it! Think what
the strain must have been when Pindar wrote, and Homer, earlier still—I
mean in the ‘Iliad’—and so with one after another, down to our own day. Is
it any wonder, then, that great writers, in the terrible strain and absorption
of all their ideas, have often scarcely known where they were, what they
were doing, or what they would be at; that they were blind and dumb, and
insensible to everything but what was perceived by the five interior
spiritual senses, like blind people, who see beautifully in their dreams, but
in their waking state are, as we have said, blind! This state of absorbedness
and strain it is which I consider to explain how it was that Socrates and
Archimedes could stand and be completely unconscious of the storm and
turmoil going on around them; how Cardanus in the profundity of his
meditation was unconscious of his Chiragra; others of the gout; one
Frenchman of a great conflagration, and a second Frenchman of the death
of his wife.”
“There, you see,” said Lenette, much delighted, in a low voice to her
husband, “how can a learned gentleman possibly hear his wife when she’s
at her washing and scrubbing?”
Stiefel, unmoved, went on with the thread of his argument: “Now, a fire
of this description can only be kindled in absolute and uninterrupted calm.
And this is the reason why all the great artists and men of letters in Paris

live nowhere but in the Rue Ste. Victoire; the other streets are all too noisy.
And it is hence that no smiths, tinkers, or tinmen, are allowed to work in the
street where a professor lives.”
“No TINMEN especially,” added Siebenkæs, very gravely. “It should
always be remembered that the mind cannot entertain more than half-a-
dozen of ideas at a time; so that if the idea of noise should make its
appearance as a wicked seventh, of course some one or other of the
previous ideas, which might otherwise have been followed up or written
down, takes its departure from the head altogether.”
Indeed Stiefel made Lenette give him her hand as a pledge that she would
always stand still, like Joshua’s sun, while Firmian was smiting the foe with
pen and scourge.
“Haven’t I often asked the bookbinder myself,” she said, “not to hammer
so hard upon his books, because my husband would hear him when he was
making his.” However, she gave the Schulrath her hand, and he went away
contented with their contentment, leaving them quite hopeful of quieter
times.
But, ye dear souls, of how little use to you is this state of peace, seeing ye
are on half-pay and starving in this cold, empty, orphan hospital of an earth
—how little will it help you in these dim labyrinthian wanderings of your
destiny, of which even the Ariadne clue-threads all turn to nets and snares?
How long will the poor’s advocate manage to live on the produce of the
pawned pewter, and on the price of the two reviews which he is going to
write? Only, we are all like the Adam of the epic, and take our first night to
be the day of judgment, and the setting of the sun for the end of the world.
We sorrow for our friends, just as if there were no brighter future YONDER,
and we sorrow for ourselves as if there were no brighter future HERE. For all
our passions are born Atheists and unbelievers.

CHAPTER VI.

MATRIMONIAL JARS—EXTRA LEAFLET ON THE LOQUACITY OF
WOMEN—MORE PLEDGING—THE MORTAR AND THE
SNUFF-MILL—A SCHOLAR’S KISS—ON THE
CONSOLATIONS OF HUMANITY—CONTINUATION OF THE
SIXTH CHAPTER.
This chapter commences at once with pecuniary difficulties. The
wretched, leaky Danaid’s bucket which our good couple had to use for
washing their groschen or two, their grains of gold-dust—few and far
between as they were—out of the sands of their Pactolus, had always run
dry again in the course of a couple of days, or of three at the outside. On
this occasion, however, they had something certain to go upon, namely, the
reviews of the two works; they could count upon four florins certainly, if
not upon five.
Early next day, after his morning kiss, Firmian seated himself upon his
critical judgment-bench again, and proceeded to pass his sentences. He
might have written an epic poem, so light were the trade-winds which had
hitherto been prevalent during the early hours of the day. From eight
o’clock in the morning till eleven in the forenoon, he was engaged in
holding up to the world in a favourable light the programme of Dr. Frank of
Pavia, which was entitled: ‘Sermo Academicus de civis medici in republica
conditione atque officiis, ex lege præipue erutis. Auct. Frank. 1785.’ He
criticised, praised, blamed, and made extracts from this little production, till
he thought he had covered enough paper to earn what would suffice to
redeem the pawned herring-dish, salad-bowl, sauce-boat, and plates—his
views on the work occupying one sheet, four pages, and fifteen lines.
The morning had passed so pleasantly, in holding Vehmgericht in this
manner, that he thought he might as well go on, and hold another in the
afternoon on the other book. He had never ventured upon this before; in the
afternoons he had done advocate’s work, not reviewer’s, appearing in the

character of defendant (maker of defence), not of fiscal (prosecutor). He
had ample reason for this, seeing that every afternoon girls and maid-
servants came with bonnets and caps, and with mouths full of
conversational treasures, which they at once unpacked; richer in language
than the Arabs, who have only a thousand words to express the same idea,
these young women had a thousand idioms for it, or different ways of
putting it;—and, as an organ when it’s out of order, immediately begins to
cipher on twenty of its pipes or so at a time as soon as you begin to work
the bellows, though no notes may be pressed down, so would they the
moment the bellows of their lungs was set a-going. He didn’t mind this,
however, seeing that at the particular hours to which these feminine alarum
clocks were set, he let his own juristical alarum go rattling off too, and
during the arguing of Lenette’s cases, went on with the arguing of his. He
wasn’t disturbed by this; he maintained: “A lawyer is not to be put out, he
can open and close his sentences when he chooses—his periods are long
tapeworms, and can be lengthened or cut down with impunity—for each
segment of them is itself a worm, each comma a period.”
But reviewing was another matter, and couldn’t be done so well. At the
same time, I shall here faithfully transcribe for the benefit of the unlearned
(the learned have read the review long ago), so much as he actually did
manage to get done after his dinner. He wrote down the title of Steffen’s
Latin translation of “Emilia Galotti,” and proceeded as follows—
“This translation meets a want which we have long experienced. It is,
indeed, a striking phenomenon, that so few of the German classics have as
yet been translated into Latin for the use of scholars, who, for their part,
have supplied us with German versions of nearly all the Greek and Roman
classic authors. The German nation can point to literary productions of its
own which are quite worthy of perusal by scholars and by linguists, who,
although they can translate them, do not understand them, because they are
not written in Latin. Lichtenberg’s ‘Pocket Calendar’ has appeared
simultaneously in a German edition—for the English, who are studying
German—and in a French for our own haute noblesse. But why should not
German original works, and even the very ‘Calendar’ itself, be made known
to linguists and to scholars by means of a good and faithful Latin
translation? There can be no doubt that they would be the very first to be
struck by the great resemblance which may be traced between the odes of
Ramler and those of Horace, if the former were but translated. The reviewer

must confess that it has always been matter of surprise, as well as regret, to
him that but two correct editions of Klopstock’s ‘Messiah’ have as yet
appeared, the original edition and his own—and that there is no Latin
edition of it for scholars—(Lessing having scarcely translated the
‘Invocation’ in his miscellaneous writings)—nor one in the curial style for
lawyers, nor a plain prose one for the commercial world, nor one in Jew-
German for the Jewish community.”
When he had got thus far, he was compelled to stop, because a
housemaid wouldn’t stop, but went on reiterating what her mistress had
gone on re-iterating, namely, how her night-cap was to be done up; twenty
times did she sketch the ground-plan and elevation of the said cap, and laid
weight on the necessity for speedy execution. Lenette answered her
tautologies with equivalent ones, paying her back to the full in her own
coin. Scarce was the housemaid out at the door, when the reviewer said—
“I haven’t written a word while that windmill was clacking. Lenette, tell
me, is it really a positive impossibility for a woman to say, ‘It’s four
o’clock,’ instead of ‘The four quarters to four have gone?’ Can no woman
say, ‘The head-clout will be ready to-morrow,’ and then an end of the
matter? Can no woman say, ‘I want a dollar for it,’ and there an end of the
story? Nor, ‘Run in again to-morrow!’ and no more about it? Can you not
do it, for instance?”
Lenette answered very coldly, “Oh! of course you think everybody thinks
just as you think yourself!”
Lenette had two feminine bad habits, which have sent millions of male
rockets, or pyrotechnic serpents—namely, curses—up skywards. The first
was, that whenever she gave the servant an order, she did it as if it were a
memorial in two copies, and then went out of the room with her and
repeated the order in question three or four times more in the passage. The
second was, that let Siebenkæs shout a thing to her, as distinctly as man
could, her first answer was, “What?” or, “What do you say?” Now, I not
only advise ladies always to demand a “second of exchange” of this sort
when they are in any embarrassment for an answer, and I laud them for so
doing; but in cases where what is required of them is attention, not the truth,
this ancora and bis which they cry to a speaker who is anxious not to waste
time, is as cumbersome as it is unnecessary. Matters of this kind are trifles
in married life only so long as the sufferer by them does not complain of

them. But when they have been found fault with they are worse than deadly
sins, and felonies, and adulteries—seeing that they occur much more
frequently.
If the author were disturbed at his work by pleonasms of the above
description; what he would do would be, not deliver a serious lecture, but
(because this is a good opportunity) write the following

EXTRA LEAFLET ON FEMALE LOQUACITY.

“The author of the work on ‘Marriage’ has said, ‘A woman who does not
talk is a stupid woman.’ But it is easier to be his encomiast than his disciple.
The cleverest women are often silent with women, and the most stupid and
most silent are often both with men. On the whole, this statement, which
has been applied to the male sex, is true also of the female, namely, that
those who think most have least to say; as frogs cease croaking when a light
is brought to the side of their pond. Moreover, the extreme talkativeness of
women is a result of the sedentary nature of their occupations. Men, whose
work is sedentary, such as tailors, shoemakers, weavers, have in common
with women not only their hypochondriac fancies, but also their loquacity.
“The little work-tables, where feminine fingers are employed, are also
the playgrounds of the feminine imagination, and their needles become little
magic wands, wherewith they transform their rooms into isles of spirits
filled with dreams. Hence it is that a letter or a book distracts a woman who
is in love more than the knitting of a whole pair of stockings. Savages say
that the monkeys refrain from talking that they may not be made to work;
but many a woman talks twice as much when she is working as when she is
not.
“I have devoted much thought to the question, what purpose this
peculiarity subserves in the economy of the universe. At first it might strike
us that Nature has ordained these re-iterations of that which has been
already said with a view to the development of metaphysical truths: for, as
demonstration, according to Jacobi and Kant, is merely a series, or
progression, of identical propositions, it is evident that women, who always
proceed from the same thing to the same thing, are continually
demonstrating. There can be no doubt, however, that the object which
Nature has chiefly had in view is the following. Accurate observers of
nature have pointed out that the reason why the leaves of trees keep up their

constant fluttering motion is that the atmosphere may be purified by this
perpetual flagellation—this oscillation of the leaves having very much the
effect of a light and gentle breeze.[43] It would, however, be very wonderful
had Nature—always economising her forces, Nature, who never does
anything in vain—ordained this much longer oscillation, this seventy years’
wagging of the feminine tongue, to no definite purpose. For the purpose in
question, however, we have not far to seek. It is the same which is
subserved by the quivering of the leaves of trees. The endless, regular,
unceasing beat of the feminine tongue is to assist in agitating and stirring up
the atmosphere, which would otherwise become putrescent. The moon has
her ocean of water, and the feminine head has its ocean of air, to stir into
salubrity and to keep in perpetual freshness. Hence a universal Pythagorean
noviciate would, sooner or later, give rise to epidemics, and Chartreuses of
nuns would become pesthouses. Hence it is that diseases of the pestiferous
type are less frequent among civilised nations, who talk the most. And
hence Nature’s beneficent arrangement that it is exactly in the largest cities
—and moreover in the winter—and moreover indoors—and in large
assemblages—that women talk most, inasmuch as it is exactly in these
places and at these periods that the atmosphere is most impure, and charged
with the largest proportion of carbonic acid and other products of
respiration, &c., requiring to be thoroughly fanned and set in motion. And,
indeed, Nature here overthrows all artificial barriers and impediments; for,
although many European women have endeavoured to imitate those of
America—who fill their mouths with water in order to keep silence—and,
while making calls, fill theirs with tea or coffee, yet these fluids have been
found rather to facilitate than to prevent the free flow of feminine speech.
“I trust that in this I am far from being like the narrow-minded
teleologists, who, to every grand sun-path, or sun-orbit of Nature, must
always be appending and intercalating little subsidiary foot-tracks and ends
in view. Such persons might permit themselves the supposition (I should be
ashamed to do so) that the oscillation of the female tongue, the use of which
is sufficiently apparent in the motion which it communicates to the
atmosphere, may possibly serve to give typical illustration to some thought
or idea of a spiritual nature—e. g. the female soul itself, perhaps.
“This belongs to that class of things with respect to which Kant has said
that they can neither be proved nor disproved. I myself should rather
incline, however, to the opinion that the talking of women is an indication

of the cessation of thought and mental activity—as in a good mill the
warning bell only rings when there is no corn left in the hopper. Moreover,
every husband knows that tongues are attached to women’s heads in order
to give due notice, by their clanging, that some contradiction, something
irregular or impossible, is dominating in them.[44] Similarly, H. Müller’s
calculating machine has a little bell in it, which rings merely to give notice
that some error has occurred in a calculation. However, it now remains for
the natural philosopher to prosecute this inquiry, and to determine to what
extent my views may prove to be erroneous.”
I may just mention that the above leaflet was written by the advocate.
He did not finish his review till the following morning. He had intended
to go on writing down his ideas on the subject of the translation of Emilia
Galotti till the money coming to him as the price of the ideas should be
enough to pay for new toes to his boots—Fecht asked a sheet and a half for
doing the pair—but he had not time for this, as he was obliged to calculate
the price of his notice by the compositor’s sight-rule, and get the money for
it that very day.
The reviews were sent to the editor; the critical invoice amounted to three
florins four groschen and five pfennige. Strange! we smile when we see the
spiritual and the corporeal, intellect and hard cash, pain and pecuniary
compensation, stated as sums in proportion; but is not our whole life an
equation, a sum in “partnership” between soul and body; and is not all
action upon us corporeal, and all reaction from us spiritual?
The servant-girl brought back only “kind regards;” not the leaves of
silver which his ink should have crystallised into. Peltzstiefel had not given
the matter a thought. He was so absorbed in his studies that he was
indifferent to his own money, and blind to the poverty of other people. He
was capable, indeed, of noticing a hiatus; but it must be in a manuscript—
not in his own or other people’s shoes, stockings, &c. An inward fire
blinded this fortunate man to the phosphorescence of the rotten wood
around him. And happy is every actor in the school-theatricals of life who
finds the lofty inward delusion suffice to compensate him for the delusions
without, or to hide them from his view;—who is so carried away by the
enthusiasm with which he enters into and renders his spiritual rôle, that the
coarse daubs of landscapes of the scenery seem to bloom, and the branches

to rustle in the refreshing showers (of peas) from the rain-box—and who
does not wake to reality at the shifting of the scenes.
But this beautiful blindness of the Rath was very distressing to our two
dear friends; their little constellation, which was to have shone in their
evening sky, fell all down in meteoric drops upon the earth. I do not blame
Stiefel; he had an ear for distress, though not an eye. But ye rich and great
ones of the earth, who, helpless in the honeycombs of your pleasures,
swimming with clogged wings in your melted sugar of roses, do not find it
an easy matter to move your hand, put it into your money-bag, and take out
the wage of him who helped to fill your honey-cells—an hour of judgment
will strike at last for you, and ask you if ye were worthy to live, let alone to
live a life of pleasure, when ye avoid even the trifling trouble of paying the
poor who have undergone the immense trouble of earning. But ye would be
better if ye thought what misery your comfortable, indolent, indisposition to
open a purse, or to read a little account, often inflicts upon the poor; if ye
pictured to yourselves the backward start of hopeless disappointment of
some poor woman whose husband comes home without his money—the
starvation, the obliteration of so many hopes, and the weary sorrowful days
of a whole family.
The advocate, therefore, put on his wicked silverising face again and
went prying about into every corner with his eyeglass, making himself into
a species of pressgang of the furniture. As a king or an English minister sits
up in his bed at night, rests his head on his hand, and considers what
commodity or what tree-stem full of birch-sap he may stick his winetap of a
new tax into, or (in another metaphor) so cut the peat of taxation that new
peat may grow in its place: thus did Siebenkæs. With his letter of marque in
his hand he scanned minutely every flag that hove in sight; he lifted up his
shaving-dish and set it down; he shook the paralytic arms of an old chair till
they cracked again—he subjected it to a trial more severe, by sitting down
in it and getting up again.—I interrupt my period to observe en passant that
Lenette fully understood the danger of this conscription and measuring of
the children of the land, and that she protested continuously and
unavailingly against this game of pledges with Job-like lamentations.—He
also took down from its hook an old yellow mirror, with a gilt leaf-pattern
frame, which hung in the bedroom opposite the green-railed bed, examined
its wooden case and the back of it, moved the glass of it up and down a
little and then hung it up again—an old firedog and some bedroom crockery

he did not touch; he whipt the lid off a porcelain butter-boat, made,
according to the plastic art of the period, in the shape of a cow, and glanced
into the inside of it, but set it back, empty and full of dust, as an ornament
on the mantelpiece again; he weighed, longer and with both hands, a spice-
mortar, and put it back again into the cupboard.
He looked more and more dangerous, and more and more merry; he drew
out with both arms the drawer of a wardrobe, shoved back table-napkins,
and begun to overhaul a mourning-dress of checked cotton a little ——. But
here Lenette flew out, seized him by his overhauling arm, and cried, “Why
not, indeed! But, please God, it shall not come to that with me!”
He shut the drawer quietly, opened the cupboard again, and carefully
lifted the mortar on to the table, saying, “Oh! very well, it matters little to
me, it comes all to the same thing; the mortar will have to take its
departure.” By covering this bell of shame with his open hand by way of a
damper, he was able to take out the pestle, its clapper, without producing
any ring or clang. He had been perfectly aware all the time that she would
rather pawn the garment of her soul (i. e. her body) than the checked
garment of that garment; but it was of set purpose that, like the Court of
Rome, he demanded the entire hand that he might be the more likely to
obtain a single finger of it—in this case the mortar—and moreover he
hoped the mere frequency with which he reiterated his determination would
save him the necessity of stating any reasons, and that he would familiarise
Lenette with the bugbear and hobgoblin by keeping it continually before her
eyes (I mean, with his design upon the mortar). Wherefore he went on to
say, “The fact is, that it’s very little that we have to pound in the course of a
twelvemonth, except when we have a quarter of a fat beast; at the same
time, just give me some idea why you’re so anxious to keep the checked
gown—what on earth is the use of it? The only time you can wear it will be
when I depart this life. Now, Lenette, that’s a terrible sort of idea; I can’t
stand it. Coin the dress into silver—eliminate it altogether; I’ll send two
pairs of mourning-buckles of mine along with it; I hope I may never have
anything to buckle with them again.”
She stormed without bounds and preached with much wisdom against all
“careless, thoughtless householders;” and this for the very reason, that she
felt it was only too probable that he would soon take every article of
furniture in the place (which he had been feeling and valuing, like a person

buying bullocks) to the slaughter-house, and—goodness gracious! the
checked dress among the rest. “I had rather starve,” she cried, “than throw
away that mortar for a mere song. The Schulrath is sure to be here to-
morrow evening, with the money for your reviews.”
“Now you begin to talk sense,” said he; and he carried the pestle
horizontally in both his hands into the bedroom, and laid it on to Lenette’s
pillow—next bringing the mortar, and placing it on his own. “If people
should happen to hear it ring,” he said, “they would think I wanted to turn it
into silver, as we were pounding nothing in it; and I shouldn’t like that.”
The united capital contained in his greenish-yellow cotton-purse, and her
large money-bag (which she wore at her girdle), amounted to about three
groschen, good money. In the evening there would have to be a groschen-
loaf bought, for cash, and the remainder of the metallic-seed must be sown
in the morning to grow the breakfast- and dinner-crop. The servant-girl
went out for the bread, but came back with the groschen and with the Job’s
message, “There’s nothing left at the bakers’ shops at this time of night but
two-groschen loaves; father (the cobbler Fecht) couldn’t get any either.”
This was lucky; the advocate could enter into partnership with the
shoemaker, and it would be easy for these partners, by each contributing a
groschen to the partnership funds, to obtain a two-groschen loaf. The Fechts
were asked if they agreed to this. The cobbler, who made no secret of his
daily bankruptcies, answered—
“With all my heart. G—d d—n me! (Heaven forgive me for swearing) if I
and the whole crew of young tatterdemalions in the place have had a scrap
of anything to fill our mouths with the whole blessed day but waxed-ends.”
In short, this coalition of the tiers état with the learned estates put an end to
the famine, and the covenanting parties broke the loaf in two and weighed it
in a just balance, it being itself both the weight and the thing weighed. Ah!
ye rich! Ye, with your manna, or bread sent from heaven, little think how
indispensable to poverty are small weights, apothecaries’ measure, heller-
loaves,[45] a dinner for eight kreuzers (and your shirt washed into the
bargain); and a broken-bread shop, where mere crumbs and black-bread
powder are to be had for money; and how the comfort of a whole family’s
evening depends on the fact that your hundredweights are on sale in lots of
half-an-ounce.

They ate, and were content. Lenette was in good humour because she had
gained her point. At night the advocate put the things which were to be
pawned upon a soft chair. In the morning she facilitated his writing by
keeping very quiet. It was a good omen, however, that she did not put the
mortar back into the cupboard. And Siebenkæs fired off various queries out
of the said bomb-mortar in parabolic curves. He knew perfectly well that
the Loretto- and Harmonica-bell in question must march that day or the
next over the frontier for a small pecuniary Abzug-geld.[46] Women always
like to put everything off till the very last possible moment.
Peltzstiefel came in that evening. It was both ridiculous and natural to
expect that the first thing the editor of the ‘Heavenly Messenger’ would do
would be to pay the critic his wages, so that he might at least be able to set
before his editor a candlestick with a candle in it, and a beer-glass
containing beer. Nothing can be more cruel than an anxiety of this sort,
because this kind of shame breaks in a moment all the springs in the human
machine. Siebenkæs wouldn’t let it trouble his head, because he knew
Stiefel wouldn’t let it trouble his. But Lenette was to be pitied, inasmuch as
the blushes of her shame were heightened by her fondness for Stiefel! At
last the Rath put his hand in his pocket. They thought now he was going to
produce the review-money; but all he took out was his snuff-machine, his
tobacco-grater, and he dived back into his coat-tail pocket for half-an-ounce
of rappee to put upon this little chopping-bench. But he had grated the half-
ounce already. He searched his breeches-pockets for money to send for
another half-ounce. Truly—and here he swore an oath for which he would
have incurred a fine had he been in England—he had sent, like an ass, not
only his purse but also the money for the reviews, carefully counted out and
neatly wrapped in paper, with his breeches—they were his plush ones—to
the tailor’s. He said it wasn’t the first time, and it was a lucky job that the
tailor was an honest man; the only thing was, he hadn’t noticed how much
there was in his purse. He innocently requested Lenette to “send and get
him an ounce of rappee; he would repay her next morning, when he sent the
money for the reviews.” Siebenkæs roguishly added, “And send for some
beer at the same time, dear.” He and Stiefel looked out of window; but he
saw that his poor wife—her bosom torn with sighs, and suffering peine
forte et dure—stole into the bedroom and noiselessly put the spice-mill into
her apron.

After a good half-hour, rappee, beer, money, and happiness entered the
room; the bell-metal of the mortar was transformed into sustenance for the
inward man, and the bell in question had been somewhat like the little altar-
bell, which in this case, besides announcing a transubstantiation, or
transformation of the substance of the bread, as it does in the Roman
Catholic Church, had undergone one itself. Their blood no longer gurgled
among rocks and stones, but flowed softly and tranquilly along, by
meadows, and over silver sands. Such is man. When he is in the depths of
misery, the first happy moment lifts him out; when he is at the height of
bliss, the remotest sorrowful moment, even though it is down beneath the
horizon, casts him to earth. No great man, who has maîtres de cuisine,
clerks of the cellar, capon-stuffers, and confectioners, has any true
enjoyment of the pleasure it is to give and receive hospitality; he gets and
gives no thanks. But a poor man and his poor guest, with whom he halves
his loaf and his can, are united by a mutual bond of gratitude.
The evening wound a soft bandage about the pain of the morning. The
poppy-juice of sixty drops of happiness was taken hourly, and the medicine
had a gently soothing and exhilarating power. When his old, kind friend was
leaving, Siebenkæs gave him a hearty, grateful kiss for his cheering visit,
Lenette standing by, with the candle in her hand. Her husband, as some
little compensation to her for having pounded her little fit of obstinacy to
groats in the mortar, said to her in an off-hand, cheerful manner, “You give
him one, too.” The blushes mantled on her cheeks like fire, and she leant
back, as if she had a mouth to avoid already. It was quite clear that, if she
had not been obliged to perform the office of torch-bearer, she would have
fled to her room on the spot. The Rath stood before her beaming with
affectionate friendliness—something like a white winter-landscape in
sunshine—waiting till—she should give him the kiss. The fruitlessness of
this expectation, and the prematureness of her bending her head out of the
way, began to vex him a little at last. Somewhat hurt, but still beaming as
affectionately as ever, he said—
“Am I not worth a kiss, Madam Siebenkæs?”
Her husband said, “Surely you don’t expect my wife to give you the kiss.
She would set her hair and everything in a blaze with the candle!”
Upon this, Peltzstiefel inclined his head slowly and cautiously, and at the
same time commandingly, down to her mouth, and laid his warm lips on

hers, like the half of a stick of melted sealing-wax on the other half. Lenette
gave him more space, by bending back her head; yet it must be said that
while she held her left arm with the candle high up in the air, for fear of fire,
she did a good deal to push away the Rath—another, more proximate, fire
—politely with the other. When he was gone, she was still just the least bit
embarrassed. She moved about with a certain floating motion, as though
some great happiness was buoying her up with its wings—the evening red
was still bright on her cheek, though the moon was high in the heavens: her
eyes were bright, but dreamy, seeming to notice nothing about her—her
smiles came before her words, and she spake very few—not the slightest
allusion was made to the mortar. She touched everything more gently, and
looked out of the window at the sky two or three times. She didn’t seem to
care to eat more of the two-groschen loaf, and drank no beer, but only a
glass or two of water. Anybody else—myself for example—would have
held up his finger and sworn he was looking upon a girl who had just had a
first kiss from her sweetheart.
And I shouldn’t have regretted having taken that oath had I seen the
sudden blush which suffused her face next day when the money for the
reviews and the snuff was brought. It was a miracle, and an extraordinary
piece of politeness, that Peltzstiefel should not have forgotten about his
having contracted this little loan—little debts of two or three groschen
always escaped his preoccupied memory. But rich people, who always carry
less money about them than the poor, and therefore borrow from them,
ought to inscribe trifling debts of this sort on a memorial tablet, in their
brain, because it is very wrong to break into a poor devil’s purse, who gets,
moreover, no thanks for these groschen of his which thus drop into the
stream of Lethe.

Now, I beg to say, I should be happy to give two sheets of this manuscript
if the day of the shooting-match were but come, solely because our dear
couple build so upon it and upon its bird-pole. For the position of these
people is really going on from bad to worse; the days of their destiny move
with those of the calendar, from October on to November, that is to say,
from the end of summer to the beginning of winter, and they find that moral

frosts and nights get harder and longer in the same ratio with those of the
season. However, I must go regularly on with my story.
I think there is no doubt that November, the month which is such a
Novembriseur of the British, is the most horrible month of all the year—for
me it is a regular Septembriseur. I wish I could hybernate, sleep, till the
beginning of the Christmas month, December. The November of ’85 had, at
the commencement of its reign, a dreadful wheezing breath, a hand as cold
as death, and an unpleasant lachrymal fistula; in fact it was unendurable.
The northeast wind, which in summer it is so pleasant to hear blowing past
one’s ears, because one knows it is a sure sign of settled weather, is, in
autumn, only a sign of steady cold. To our couple the weathercock was
really a funeral standard. Though they didn’t exactly go out to the woods
themselves with baskets and barrows to pick up fallen branches and twigs,
like the poor day-labourer, they had to buy the stuff for firewood from the
wood-gatherers, by weight, as if it had been wood from the Indies, and it
had to be dried by the combustion of other wood before it would burn. But
this damp cold weather was more trying to the advocate’s stoicism, after all,
than even to his purse; he couldn’t run out and go up a hill, and look about
him, and seek in the heavens for that which consoles and comforts the
anxious and sorrowful, that which dissipates the clouds which shroud our
life, and shows us guiding nebulæ (Magellan’s clouds), if nothing else,
gleaming through the fog-banks. For when he could go up the Rabenstein,
or some other hill, he could get sight from thence of the aurora of the sun of
happiness, though that sun was under his horizon; the sorrows and torments
of this earthly life lay, writhing, like other vipers, in the clefts and hollows
beneath him, and no rattlesnake could rear itself with its fangs up to his hill.
Ah! there, in the free air, close to the ocean of life which stretches on into
the invisible distance of infinity, near to the lofty heavens, the blue coal
smoke of the stifling, suffocating dwelling of our daily life cannot rise to us,
we see its wreaths hanging far down beneath; our sorrows drop, like
leeches, from our bleeding bosoms, and raised, for the time, above our
woes, we stretch our arms—no fetters on them now, though sore and
marked, and bruised with the galling iron—we stretch them out as if to soar
in the pure bright æther; we stretch them out, and fain would take to our
bosom the peaceful universe above us, we stretch them to the invisible
eternal Father, like children hastening home to Him—and we open them
wider yet to clasp our visible mother, created Nature, crying, “Oh take not

this solace, this comfort, away from me, when I am down there again
among the fog and the sorrow.” And why is it that prisoners and the sick are
so wretched in their confinement? They are there shut up in their holes, the
clouds sail over them, they can only see the mountains far away in the
distance, these mountains whence, as from those of the Polar regions in
summer midnights, the sun, down below the horizon, can be seen shining
with a mild face, as if in slumber. But in this wretched weather though
Siebenkæs could not enjoy the consolations of imagination, which bloom
beneath the open sky, he could derive comfort from reason, which thrives in
the flower-pots of the window-sills. His chief consolation, which I
commend to everybody, was this: Man is under the pressure of a necessity
of two kinds—an every-day necessity, which, everybody bears
uncomplainingly, and a rare, or yearly-recurrent necessity, which is only
submitted to after struggles and complaints. The daily and everlastingly
recurrent necessity is this—that corn does not ripen in winter—that we have
not got wings, though so many lower creatures have them—or that we
cannot go and stand upon the ring-shaped craters of the lunar mountains,
and looking down into the abysses, which are miles in depth, watch the
marvellous and beautiful effects of the setting sun’s rays. The annual, or
rarely recurrent, necessity is that there is rainy weather when the corn is in
blossom—that there are a great many water-meadows of this world where it
is very bad walking, and that sometimes, because we have corns, or no
shoes, we cannot even walk anywhere. Only the annual necessity and the
daily are of exactly equal magnitude, and it is just as senseless to murmur
because we have paralysed limbs as because we have no wings. All the PAST
—and this alone is the subject of our sorrow—is of so iron a necessity that
in the eyes of a superior intelligence it is just as senseless of an apothecary
to mourn because his shop is burnt to the ground as to sigh because he can’t
go botanising in the moon, although there may be many things in the phials
there which he has not got in his.
I mean to introduce an extra leaflet here on the consolations which we
may meet with in this damp, chilly, draughty life of ours. Anybody who
may be annoyed at these brief digressions of mine, and is scarcely to be
consoled, let him seek consolation in this—

EXTRA LEAFLET ON CONSOLATION.

A time may, that is to say, must come when it shall be held to be a moral
obligation not only to cease to torment other people, but to cease to torment
ourselves; a time must and will come when we shall wipe away the greater
part of our tears, even here on earth, were it only from proper pride.
It is true, nature is so constantly drawing tears from our eyes, and forcing
sighs from our breasts, that a wise man can scarcely ever wholly lay aside
his body’s garb of mourning; but let his soul wear none! For if it is a simple
duty or merit to endure minor sorrows with proper cheerfulness, it is
likewise a merit, only a greater one, to bear the greatest sorrows bravely,
just as the same reason which enjoins the forgiveness of small injuries is
equally valid for the forgiveness of the greatest.
What we have principally to contend against, and to treat with due
contempt, in sorrow, as in anger, is its paralysing poisonous sweetness,
which we are so loth to exchange for the exertion of consoling ourselves
and of exercising our reasoning faculties.
We must not expect Philosophy to produce, with one stroke of the pen,
the converse effect to that which Rubens produced, when he converted a
smiling child into a weeping one with one stroke of his brush. It is sufficient
if she converts the soul’s deep mourning garb into half-mourning; it is
enough when I can say to myself, “I am content to bear that share of my
sorrow of which my philosophy has not relieved me; but for her it would
have been greater—the gnat’s sting would have been a wasp’s.”
It is only through the imagination, as from an electric condenser, that
even physical pain emits its sparks upon us. We would bear the severest
physical pains without a wince if they were not of longer duration than a
sixtieth part of a second; but we never really do have an hour of pain to
endure, but only a succession of sixtieth parts of a second of pain, the sixty
separate rays of which are concentrated into the focus and burning-point of
a second, and directed upon our nerves by the imagination alone. The most
painful part of corporeal pain is the incorporeal part of it, that is to say, our
own impatience, and our delusive conviction that it will last for ever.
We all know for certain that we shall have given up grieving for many a
loss, in twenty, ten, or two years why do we not say to ourselves, “Very well
—if this is an opinion which I shall cease to hold in twenty years’ time,—I
prefer to abandon it to-day, at once? Why must it take me twenty years to
abandon an error, when I need not hold it twenty hours?”

When I awake from a dream which has painted for me an Otaheite on the
black background of the night, and find the flowery land melted away, I
scarcely sigh, and I think it was but a dream. How were it if I had actually
possessed this flowery island in waking life, and it had been submerged in
the sea by an earthquake? Why should I not, then also, say, “The island was
but a dream”? Why am I more inconsolable for the loss of a LONGER dream
than for the loss of a SHORTER (for that is what constitutes the distinction),—
and why does man think a great loss less necessary and less probable than a
small?
The reason is that every sentiment and every passion is a mad thing,
demanding, or building, a complete world of its own. We are capable of
being vexed because it’s past twelve o’clock, or because it’s not past, but
only just twelve o’clock. What nonsense! The passion wants besides a
personality of its own (sein eignes Ich), and a world of its own,—a time of
its own as well. I beg every one, just for once, to let his passions speak
plainly out, and to listen to them, and ascertain what it is that they really
each of them want; he will be dismayed when he sees what monstrous
things are these desires of theirs which they have previously only half
muttered. Anger would have but one neck for all mankind, love would have
but one heart, sorrow but one pair of lachrymal ducts, and pride two bent
knees!
When I was reading in Widman’s ‘Höfer Chronik’ the account of the
fearful, bloody times of the thirty years’ war, and, as it were, lived them
over again; when I heard once more the cries for help of those poor
suffering people, all struggling in the Danube-whirlpools of their days—and
saw the beating of their hands, and their delirious wanderings on the
crumbling pillars of broken bridges, foaming billows and drifting ice-floes
dashing against them; and then, when I thought “All these waves have gone
down, the ice is melted, the howling turmoil is all sunk to silence, so are the
human beings and all their sighs”—I was filled with a melancholy comfort,
a thought of consolation for all times, and I asked, “Was, and is, then, this
passing, cursory, transient burst of sorrow at the CHURCHYARD-GATE OF LIFE,
which three steps into the nearest cavern could end, a fit cause for this
cowardly lamentation?” Truly if, as I believe, there be such a thing as true
patience under an eternal woe, then, verily, patience under a transitory
sorrow is hardly worth the name.

A great but unmerited national calamity should not humble us, as the
theologians would have it—it should make us proud. When the long, heavy
sword of war falls upon mankind, and thousands of blanched hearts are torn
and bleeding—or when in the blue, pure evening sky the hot cloud of a
burning city, smoking on its funereal pyre, hangs dark and lurid, like a
cloud of ashes, the ashes of thousands of hearts and joys all burnt to cinders
and dust—then let thy spirit be lifted up in pride, let it loathe, contemn, and
despise tears, and that for which they fall, and let it say—
“Thou art much too small a thing, thou every-day, common life, that an
immortal being should be inconsolable with regard to thee, thou torn and
tattered chance-bargain of an existence. Here upon this earth—the ashes of
centuries rolled into a sphere, worked into shape and form from vapour by
convulsion—the cry of one dreaming in a sorrowful dream—I say, it is a
disgrace that the sigh should cease only when the breast which gives it
utterance is resolved into its elements, and that the tear should cease to flow
only when the eye is closed in death.”
But moderate this thy sublime transport of indignation and put to thyself
this question, “If He, the Infinite one, who, veiled from thy sight, sits
surrounded by the gleaming abysses, without bounds save such as Himself
creates, were to lay bare to thy sight the immeasurability of infinity, and let
Himself be seen of thee as he distributes the suns, the great spirits, the little
human hearts, and our days, and a tear or two therein; wouldst thou rise up
out of thy dust against Him, and say, ‘Almighty, be other than thou art!’”
But there is one sorrow which will be forgiven thee, and for which there
is recompense; it is sorrow for thy dead. For this sweet sorrow for thy lost
ones is, in truth, but another form of consolation; when we long for them,
this is but a sadder way of loving them still; and when we think of their
departure we shed tears, as well as when we picture to ourselves our happy
meeting with them again. And perhaps these tears differ not.

CONTINUATION AND CONCLUSION OF
CHAPTER VI.

THE CHECKED CALICO DRESS—MORE PLEDGES—CHRISTIAN
NEGLECT OF THE STUDY OF JUDAISM—A HELPING ARM
(OF LEATHER) STRETCHED FORTH FROM THE CLOUDS—
THE AUCTION.
The St. Andrew’s shooting-match will take place in the seventh chapter:
the present one fills up the wintry thorny interval up to that period—that is
to say, the wolf-month with its wolf-hunger. Siebenkæs would at that period
have been much annoyed if any one had told him beforehand with what
compassion the flourishing state of his trading enterprises was one day to be
described by me, and, as a consequence, read by millions of persons in all
time to come. He wanted no pity, and said, “If I am quite happy, why should
you be pitying me?” The articles of household furniture which he had
touched, as with the hand of death, or notched with his axe, like trees
marked for cutting, were one by one duly felled and hauled away. The
mirror, with the floral border, in the bedroom (which, luckily for itself,
could not see itself in any other), was the first thing to be tolled out of the
house by the passing- or vesper-bell, under the pall of an apron. Before he
stationed it in the train of this dance of death, he proposed to Lenette a
substitute for it, the checked calico mourning-dress, in order to accustom
her to the idea. It was the “Censeo Carthaginem delendam” (I vote for the
destruction of Carthage) which old Cato used to say daily in the senate after
every speech.
Next the old arm-chair was got rid of bodily (not like Shakespeare’s arm-
chair, which was weighed out by the ounce, like saffron, or in carats, like
gold), and the firedog went in company with it. Siebenkæs had the wisdom
to say, before they went away, “Censeo Carthaginem delendam,” i. e.
“Wouldn’t it be better to pawn the checked calico?”

They could barely subsist for two days upon the dog and the chair.
And then the process of alchemical transmutation of metals was applied
to the shaving-basin and the bedroom crockery, which were converted into
table-money. Of course he previously said “Censeo.” It is scarcely worth
the trouble, but I may just observe here how little fruit was born by this
branch of trade; it was rather a woody branch than a fruit-bearing one.
The lean porcelain cow or butter-boat would scarcely have served as their
nourishing milch cow for more than a day, if she had not been attended by
seven potentates (that is to say, most miserable prints of them), who went
“into the bargain,” but for whom the woman at the shop added some melted
butter. Wherefore he said “Censeo.” Many of my readers must remember
my mentioning that, a short time ago, when he was distributing sentences of
death among the furniture, he did not take very much notice of certain
table-napkins which were lying beside the checked calico dress. Now,
however, he acted as screech-owl, or bird of death, and gallows-priest to
them also, and routed them out all but a few. When they were gone, he
remarked, in an incidental manner, shortly before Martinmas Day, that the
napkin-press was still to the fore, though it was not very clear what was the
use of it, as there was nothing for it to press.
“If such a thing should be necessary,” he said, “the press might very well
get leave of absence on private affairs, until we get through the smoothing-
press, oiling-press, and napkin-press of destiny, and come out all smooth
and beautiful ourselves, and can stick the napkins into our button-holes on
their return.” His first intention had even been to reverse the order of the
funeral procession, and put the press in the van of it as avant-courier of the
napkins, and in that event he would only have had to invert his syllogism
(as well as his procession) in this way: “I don’t see what we can do with the
napkins, or how we’re to press them and keep them smooth, till we get the
press home again.”
I am most firmly convinced that the majority of people would have done
as Lenette did with reference to my trade-consul Siebenkæs, and his
Hanseatic confederation with everybody who dealt in anything—that is,
clasped her hands above her head, and said, “Oh! the thoughtless, silly
creature! he’ll soon be a beggar at this rate: the beautiful furniture!”
Firmian’s constant answer was—

“You would have me kneel down and howl, and tear my coat in
lamentation, like a Jew—my coat, which is torn already and pull my hair
out by the roots—that hair, which terror frequently causes to fall off in a
single night. Isn’t it enough if you do the howling? Are you not my
appointed præfica and keening-woman? Wife, I swear to you, and that as
solemnly as if I were standing on pig’s bristles,[47] that if it is the will of
God, who has given me so light and merry a heart—if it be His will that I
am to go about the town with eight thousand holes in my coat, and without
a sole to either shoe or stocking that I am to go on always getting poorer
and poorer” (here his eyes grew moist in spite of him, and his voice
faltered), “may the devil take me and lash me to death with the tuft of his
tail if I leave off laughing and singing; and anybody who pities me, I tell
him to his face, is an ass. Good heavens! the apostles, and Diogenes, and
Epictetus, and Socrates, had seldom a whole coat to their backs—never
such a thing as a shirt—and shall a creature such as I let a hair of him turn
grey for such a reason, in miserable PROVINCIALISTIC times such as
these?”
Right, my Firmian! Have a proper contempt for the narrow heart-sacs of
the big clothes-moths about you—the human furniture-boring worms. And
ye, poor devils, who chance to be reading me—whether ye be sitting in
colleges or in offices, or even in parsonage-houses, who perhaps haven’t
got a hat without a hole in it to put on your heads, most certainly haven’t
got a black one—rise above the effeminate surroundings of your times to
the grand Greek and Roman days, wherein it was thought no disgrace to a
noble human creature to have neither clothes nor temple, like the statue of
Hercules; take heed only that your soul shares not the poverty of your
outward circumstances; lift your faces to heaven with pride—a sickly faint
northern Aurora is veiling it, but the eternal stars are breaking through the
thin blood-red storm!
It was but a few weeks now to the St. Andrew’s Day shooting-match,
which was Lenette’s consolation in all her troubles, and to which all her
wishes were directed; however, there came one day on which she was
something worse than melancholy—inconsolable.
This was Michaelmas: on that day the press was to have followed
Lenette’s Salzburg emigrants, the napkins, as their lady superior; but
nobody in all the town would have anything to do with it. The sole anchor

of refuge was one Jew, because there was no species of animal (in the shape
of articles of merchandise) which did not flee to his Noah’s ark of a shop.
Unfortunately, however, the day when the napkin-press applied to him was
a Jewish feast-day, which he kept more strictly than ever he did his word.
He said he would see about it to-morrow.
Permit me, if you please, to take this opportunity of making a few
remarks of importance. Is it not a piece of most culpable negligence on the
part of the Government that, seeing the Jews are, as it were, farmers-general
and metal-kings of the Christians in German states, the days of their feasts
and fasts, and other times connected with their worship, are not published
and clearly made known for the benefit of those very numerous persons
who wish to borrow of them, or have any business to transact with them?
Those who suffer most from this omission are just the upper circles of
society, persons of birth and rank, officials of high position; these are the
persons who bring papers and want money on Feasts of Haman, Feasts of
Esther, of the Destruction of the Temple, of the Rejoicing of the Law, and
can’t obtain any. Surely the Jewish festivals, with the hours at which they
begin and end, ought to be given in every almanack—as they have been
fortunately, for a considerable time, in those of Berlin and Bavaria—or in
newspapers—or be proclaimed by the crier, and carefully taught in schools.
The Jew, indeed, has no need of a calendar of our festivals, since we are
always ready to put off and postpone, if he likes, every Sunday of the year,
though it were the first Sunday of it, the feast of the Jewish Circumcision;
and consequently hereafter, when the universal monarchy of the Jews is
actually established, he won’t take the trouble to append a Christian
calendar to his own Jewish calendars, as we now append the Jewish to our
Christian. The necessity, however, of inculcating in our schools a better and
more exact acquaintance with the seasons of the Jewish festivals, and with
their religious observances in general, will not be so fully manifest until
hereafter, when the Jews shall have elevated Germany to the proud position
of being their Land of Promise, leaving us to make our crusade, and our
return to the Asiatic land of promise, if we feel disposed—to a holy
sepulchre, and a sacred Calvary.
And yet I think (to close this digression by another) that hereafter, when
we become the Christian numerators of Jewish denominators, we should be
wrong to set out, as modern crusaders, for the holy land, as to which the
Jews themselves trouble their heads but little. It is certain that they will treat

us with a far wider measure of the spirit of tolerance than we, unfortunately,
have extended to them; but their genius for commerce, which they have
hitherto been so much reproached with, will be found to prove itself a
guardian angel for us poor Christians, and to take us under its tutelage,
inasmuch as we are so indispensably necessary to them as purchasers and
consumers of the unprepared hindquarters of the cattle (for it is only the
fore-quarters which they may eat, unless the veins are all taken out). Who
else but Christians can take the place of the beasts of burden—as no animal
may be degraded by working on the “Schabbes”[48] (Sabbath)—and
perform the necessary draught and other labour? and to whom are they to
entrust the performance of menial and manual employments, like the
ancient republicans, but to us, their nobler slaves and helots, whom they
will, therefore, be sure to treat with more consideration than they have
heretofore treated us when we have omitted to pay our promissory notes as
they became due.
I return to our poor’s advocate, and record that on Michaelmas Day he
could get no money, and consequently no Michaelmas goose. Lenette’s
grief at the absence of the goose of her ecclesiastical communion we must
all share. Women, who care less about eating and drinking than the most
ascetic philosophers—caring, indeed, more about the latter themselves than
about the former—are at the same time not to be controlled if they have to
go without certain chronological articles of diet. Their natural liking for
burgherly festivities brings it about that they would rather go without the
appointed hymns and the gospel of the day than without butter-cakes at
Christmas, cheesecakes at Easter, the goose at Michaelmas; their stomachs
require a particular cover for each festival, like Catholic altars. So that the
canonical dish is a kind of secondary sacrament, which, like the primary
one, they take, not for the palate’s sake, but “by reason of the ordinance.”
Antoninus and Epictetus could provide Siebenkæs with no efficient
substitute for the goose, with which to console the weeping Lenette, who
said, “We really are Christians, whatever you may say, and belong to the
Lutheran Church; and every Lutheran has a goose on his table to-day—I’m
sure my poor dear father and mother always had. As for you, you believe in
nothing.” Whether he believed in anything or not, however, he slipped off,
though it was the afternoon of the Jewish feast-day, to the Jew, who kept a
nice pen of geese, with livers both fat and lean, serving as a post-stable for
country friends of his own religion. When he went into his place he pulled a

duodecimo Hebrew Bible out of his pocket and put it down on the table,
with the words, “It was a great pleasure to him to meet with a keen,
diligent, student of the law; to such a man it would be a real satisfaction to
make a present of his Bible, without asking a halfpenny for it; as it was, an
unpointed edition (that is to say, one without vowels), he couldn’t read it
himself, especially as even if it had had points, he couldn’t have managed
it. This napkin-press of mine, here”—he said, producing it from under his
coat-tails “I should be very glad if you would allow me to leave with you,
because I find it a good deal in my way at home; I don’t quite know what to
do with it. You see, I have particular reasons for being anxious to get hold
of a goose out of your pen; I don’t mind if it’s as thin as a whipping-post. If
you like, you may call it giving it to me in charity on a holy day of this sort,
for all I care; it’ll make no difference to me. If I should ever come and take
away the press again, it’ll be an easy matter, and it’ll be time enough, to go
into the transaction afresh.”
It was thus that, in order to secure his wife the free exercise of her
religious observances, he brought in this goose of controversy, which
seemed to have some polemical bearing, as well as to be connected with
distinctive doctrines of faith; and next day these two Doctor Martin
Lutherists ate up the Schmalkaldian article (and, indeed, another
Schmalkaldian article, a commercial one—cold iron, namely—has often
been employed in defence of the articles of theology). Thus was the capitol
of the Lutheran religion saved, in an easy manner, by the bird, which was
roasted (so to speak) at the fire of an auto-da-fé.
But on this particular morning up came the wigmaker, an individual
whom he was delighted to see generally, though not to-day, for on the day
before, Michaelmas, the quarter’s house rent was due, as we may
remember. The Friseur presented himself as a sort of mute bill “at sight;”
yet he was polite enough not to ask for anything. He merely mentioned, in a
casual manner, that “there was going to be an auction of a variety of things
on the Monday before St. Andrew’s Day, and in case the advocate might
care to get together a few things for it, he thought he would give him notice
of it, as he held a life appointment from the Houses of Assembly as auction-
crier.”
He was scarcely down stairs before Lenette gave deep, but not loud,
expression to her woes, saying he had “dunned them now, and that the

whole house must know all about their disreputable style of housekeeping:
had he not talked about furniture?” It was incomprehensible how the poor
woman could have fancied anybody had been in the dark about it before!
Poor people are always the first to nose out poverty. At the same time
Firmian had been ashamed to tell the Friseur that he had been obliged to
appoint himself auctioneer of his own furniture. Here he perceived that he
blushed for his poverty more before one person, and before the poor, than
he did before a whole town, and before the rich; and he flew into a furious
indignation with these execrable eructations of human vanity in his noblest
parts.
The path from hence to St. Andrew’s Day, all bordered with nothing but
thistles as it is, cannot possibly seem longer, even to the reader, than it did
to my hero, who, moreover, had to take hold of the thistles and pull them up
with his own hands. The garden of his life kept getting more and more like
a jardin Anglais, where only prickly and barren trees, but no fruit-trees,
were to be found.
Every night, when he opened the latch of his bed-railings, he would say,
with great enjoyment, to his Lenette, “Only twenty (or nineteen, or
eighteen, or seventeen) days now to the shooting-match.” But the
hairdresser and auction-crier had played the deuce and all with Lenette,
though the evenings were long and dark and splendidly convenient for
needy borrowers on deposit, veiling and hiding the naked, abashed, misery
of the poor; she was ashamed the people in the house should know, and
afraid to meet them. Firmian, who was astonished equally at the
inexhaustible resources of his brain and of his house, and who kept saying
to himself, “Do you know, I’m really curious to see what I shall hit upon to-
day again, and how I shall manage to get out of this difficulty now—”
Firmian, a day or two after the Michaelmas dinner, got his eye upon two
more good articles of furniture—a long cask-siphon and a rocking-horse (a
relic of his childhood). “We haven’t a cask, and we haven’t a baby,” he said.
But his wife implored him, for heaven’s sake, “not to put her to this shame.
The horse and the siphon” (she said) “are things that would stick out of the
basket so terribly, or out from under one’s apron, and in the moonlight
everybody would see them.”
And yet something must go! Firmian said, in an odd cutting, yet
sorrowful way, “It must be so! Fate, like Pritzel,[49] is beating on the bottom

of the drum, and the oats are jumping on the top of it; we have got to eat off
the drum.”
“Anything,” she said, faint and beaten, “except things that stick out so.”
She searched about, opened the top drawer of the cupboard, and took out a
faded wreath of artificial flowers: she said, “Rather take this!” and neither
smiled nor wept! He had often looked at it; but as he had sent it to her
himself last New Year’s Day, the day of their betrothal, and because it was
so romantically beautiful (a white rose, two red rosebuds, and a border of
forget-me-nots) every fibre of that tender heart of his would have stood out
against parting with this pretty relic—this memorial of better, happier, days.
The patient, resigned way in which she made the sacrifice of these poor old
flowers tore his heart in two. “Lenette!” he said, moved beyond expression
—“why, you know, these are our betrothal flowers!”
“Well, who’s to be any the wiser,” she said, quite cheerfully and quite
coolly. “You see they’re not so big as other things are.”
“Have you forgotten, then quite,” he stammered, “what I told you these
flowers meant?”
“Let me see,” the said, more coldly still, and proud of the goodness of her
memory, “the forget-me-nots mean that I’m not to forget you, and that you
won’t forget me—the buds mean happiness—no, no, the buds mean
happiness that’s not quite all come yet—and the white rose—I don’t
recollect now what the white rose means——”
“It means pain” (he said, overwhelmed with emotion), “and innocence,
and sorrow, and a poor white face.” He clasped her in his arms, as the tears
came to his eyes, and cried, “Oh! poor darling! poor darling! What can I
do? It’s all beyond me! I should like to give you everything the world
contains, and I have nothing——”
He ceased suddenly, for while his arms were round her, she had shut up
the drawer of the cupboard, and was looking at him with calm, clear, gentle
eyes, not the trace of a tear in them. She resumed her petition in the old tone
saying, “I may keep the siphon and the horse, mayn’t I? We shall get more
money for the flowers.” What he said was, “Lenette! Oh, darling Lenette,”
over and over again, each time more tenderly.
“But why not?” she asked, more gently each time, for she didn’t
understand him in the least. “I had sooner pawn the coat off my back,” was
his answer. But as she now got the alarming idea into her head that what he

was driving at was the calico gown, and as this put her into a great state,
and as she immediately began to inveigh warmly against all pledging of
large articles; and as he clearly perceived that her previous coldness had
been thoroughly genuine, and not assumed, he knew, alas! the very worst, a
grief which no sweet drops of philosophy could avail to alleviate, namely—
she either loved him no longer, or, she had never really loved him at all.
The sinews of his arms were now fairly cut in two, the sinews of his arms
which had till now kept misfortune at bay. In the prostration of this his
(spiritual) putrid fever he could say nothing but—“Whatever you please,
dear; it’s all the same to me now.”
Upon that, she went out delighted, and quickly, to old Sabel, but came
back again immediately. This pleased him; sorrow having gnawed deeper
into his heart during the three moments she was gone, he could follow up
the bitter speech with these quiet words: “Put up your marriage wreath
along with the other flowers, there’ll be a little more weight, and a little
more money for it; though it is nothing like such pretty work as my
flowers.”
“My marriage wreath?” cried Lenette, colouring with anger, while two
bitter tears burst from her eyes. “No, that I positively shall NOT let go, it
shall be put with me into my coffin, as my poor dear mother’s was. Did you
not take it up in your hand from the table on my wedding-day, when I had
taken it off to have my hair powdered, and say you thought quite as much of
it as you did of the marriage ceremony itself, if not more? (I noticed what
you said very carefully, and remember it quite distinctly). No, no, I am your
wife, at all events, and I shall never let that wreath go as long as I live.”
His emotion now took a new bent, one more in harmony with hers, but he
masked this behind the question, “What made you come back in such a
hurry?” It was that old Sabel had just been in at the bookbinder’s, it seemed,
and Herr von Meyern had been there too. That young gentleman was in the
habit of getting off his horse and dropping in, partly to see what new books
the ladies were having bound at the bookbinder’s, and in what sort of pretty
bindings, partly to stick up his leg with its riding boot upon the cobbler’s
bench and get him to stitch a top tighter, asking about all sorts of things
during the process. The world—(which expression can only mean the
collection of female tongue-threshers of empty straw belonging to
Kuhschnappel)—may undoubtedly conclude, if it be so minded, the Venner

to be a regular Henry the Fowler with respect to more women than one in
the house, the latter being a feminine Volière to him; but I want proofs of
this. Lenette, however, didn’t trouble herself about any proofs, but piously
fled out of the way of Rosa the birdcatcher.
I further relate (doing so, moreover, without any very marked blush for
the mutability of the human heart) that at this point Firmian’s compressed
thoracic cavity grew several inches wider, so as to give admission to a
considerable modicum of happiness, for no other reason but that Lenette
had kept such a tight grasp of her marriage-wreath, and had endured the
Venner for so short a time. “She is faithful, at all events, although she may
be rather cool; in fact, I don’t really believe she is a bit cool, either, after
all.” So that he was quite pleased that she should have her way (which was
his also) about keeping the wedding-wreath in the house and in her heart.
Besides which, without contending further about the betrothal-wreath, he let
her have that other way of hers, though less willingly—this being a
proceeding which hurt his feelings only, not hers. His old flower keepsake
was accordingly deposited in the hands of an obliging lady who rejoiced in
the title of “Appraiser,” on the solemn understanding that it was to be
redeemed with the very first dollar which should drop from the bird-pole on
St. Andrew’s Day.
The blood-money of these silken flowers was so parcelled out as to be
made available by way of stepping-stones in the muddy path leading to the
Sunday before the shooting-match. This Sunday (the 27th November, 1785)
was to be followed by the Monday for which the auction had been
announced; on the Wednesday he (and I hope all of us with him) would be
in his place in front of the bird-pole.
It is true, however, that on the Sunday he had to ford a stream swollen to
a considerable extent by rainy weather; we will go through it after him, but
I give due notice that, in the middle, it is pretty deep.
The stomach of his inner man evinced a wonderful disrelish, and
exhibited a reversed peristaltic motion towards everything in the shape of
pawning, since the affair of the flowers. The reason was—there was nothing
more to which he could refer his wife. At first, he used to refer her to the
shooting-match; but when the mortar and the chair had evacuated the
fortress without tuck of drum, they not being articles of a sort to be obtained
as prizes for shooting, he took to referring her to public auctions at which

he could always buy what he might require at about half price. Finally,
though still referring her to auctions, he did so no longer with a view to
import, but to export, trade—as a seller, rather than as a buyer, of
commodities; in which respect he surpasses Spain.
He who has risen victorious over great and serious attacks of an insulting
or offensive nature, has often had to yield to very small and trifling ones;
and so it is with our troubles. The stout, firm heart, which has beat strongly
on all through long years of bitter trial and affliction, will often break at
once, like over-flooded ice, at some lightest touch of Fortune’s foot. Till
now, Siebenkæs had carried himself erect, and borne his burden without a
bend, ay, and with a merrier heart than many a man. Up to this hour, he
really hadn’t minded the whole affair one single button. Had he not (merely
to mention one or two instances) pointed out that, in the matter of clothes,
he was better off than the Emperor of Germany, who (he said) had nothing
to put on, on his coronation-day in Frankfort, but a frightful old cast-off
robe of Charles the Great’s, not much better than Rabelais’s old gown,
though that was not by several centuries so old as the Imperial one? And
once when his wife was sadly looking over his fading perennial clothes
flora, he told her all she had to do was to suppose he was serving in the new
world with a thousand or so of other Anspach men, and the ship which was
bringing out their new uniforms had been captured by the enemy, so that the
whole force had nothing to put on but what they would have preferred to
have been able to take off. Likewise that what he had had to go upon, and to
take his stand upon for a considerable time past, had been something much
superior to his own pair of boots (by this he clearly meant pure apathy); as
for his boots, they, having been twice new fronted, had been shoved in like
pocket telescopes, or trombones, till they had become a pair of fair halt-
boots; just as the German corpora, also, by the influence of long years of
civilisation and culture, have got considerably taken in, the long rifle having
been docked into a short, or non-commissioned officers’ rifle.
But on the Sunday to which I am alluding, he was far too much scared at
the sight of one single bird of prey and of ill omen, flying athwart the lonely
Sahara desert in which his life was passing. He himself was taken by
surprise at this alarm of his; he would have expected anything else but
alarm under the circumstances. For as it had hitherto been his custom to
prepare himself for dark and tragic scenes by comedy rehearsals of them—
by which I mean, that he carefully read up, beforehand, all the legal steps

which Herr von Blaise could take against him, thus taking up, in sport, and
in advance, the burdens which the future had in store—it astonished him
greatly to find that an ill, quite certain to come, and clearly foreseen, should
prove to have longer thorns, when it came up towards him out of the future,
than it seemed to possess while still at a distance.
So that when, on the Sunday, the messenger of the Inheritance Office
came, with the long-expected THIRD dilatory plea of the Heimlicher, and
with the third affirmatory decree written on the face thereof, as his breast
was in the condition of a vacuum (no air to breathe in it) before his coming,
his poor heart grew sick and breathless indeed, when this fresh stroke of the
air-pump exhausted the receiver even more thoroughly than it had been
emptied before.
Amid the multiplicity of matters which it has been my duty to report to
the public, I have omitted, on purpose, all mention of the second of Mr.
Blaise’s dilatory pleas, because I thought I might assume that every reader
who has had as much as half a ship’s pound weight of legal documents
through his hands—or one single settlement of law accounts—would take it
for granted, as a matter of course, that the first petition for delay would
infallibly be followed by a second. It reflects much discredit on our
administration of justice that every upright, honourable counsel finds
himself compelled to adduce such a number of reasons (I wish I might say
“lies”) before he can be accorded the smallest, necessary term of delay; he
has got to say his children and his wife are dying; that he has met with all
kinds of unfortunate accidents, and has thousands of things to do, journeys
to make, and sicknesses. Whereas it ought to be quite enough for him to say
that the preparation of the innumerable petitions for delay with which he is
overwhelmed, leaves him little time to write anything else. People ought to
notice that these petitions for delay tend, as all other petitions do, to the
protracting of the suit, just as all the wheels of a watch work together to
retard the principal wheel. A slow pulse is a sign of longevity not only in
human beings but in lawsuits. It seems to me that an advocate who has any
conscience is glad to do what he can to promote the length of life in his
opponent’s suit—not in his own client’s, he would make an end of that in a
minute if he could—partly to punish the said opponent, partly to terrify
him, or else to snatch, from his grasp a favourable judgment (a sort of thing
as to which nobody can form an idea whether it is likely or not)—for as
many years as possible; just as in ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ the people who had a

black mark on their brow were doomed to the torture of eternal life. The
object of the man of business on the opposite side is a similar prolongation
of the war to his opponents, and thus the two counsel immesh the two
clients in a long drag-net of documents, &c., each with the best possible
intentions. On the whole, lawyers are not so indifferent to the question,
“What is the law?” as to the question, “What is justice?” For which reason
they prefer arguing to writing; as Simonides, when he was asked by the king
the question, “What is God?” begged for a day to consider his answer—
then for another day—then for another—and for another, and always for
another, because no man’s life is sufficient to answer that question—so the
jurist, when he is asked, “What is justice?” keeps continually asking for
more and more delays—he can never reply to the question—indeed, if the
judges and clients would let him, he would gladly devote his whole life to
writing replies to a legal question of this sort. Advocates are so used to this
way of looking at matters, that it never strikes them that there is anything
unusual about it.
I return to my story. This blow of the iron secular arm, with its six long
thief- and writing-fingers, all but felled Siebenkæs to the earth. The vapours
about his path in life condensed to morning mist, the morning mist to
evening clouds, the clouds to showers of rain. “Many a poor devil has more
to do than he can manage,” he said. If he had had a pleasant, cheerful wife,
he would not have said this; but one such as his, who painfully trailed her
cross (instead of taking it up), and was all lamentations—an elegiac poetess,
a Job’s comforter—was herself a second cross to bear.
He set to work and thought the whole thing over; he had hardly enough
left to buy the next year’s almanack, or a bundle of Hamburgh quills (for
his satires used up Lenette’s feather dusters much more than his own
energies, so that he often thought of cutting Stiefel’s red pipe-stalk into a
pen); he would have been delighted to convert his plates into something to
eat (there were none left, however), following the example of the Gauls,
who used round pieces of bread as plates first, and afterwards as dessert; or
of the Huns, who, after riding upon pieces of beef (by way of saddles) till it
was partly cooked, dined upon these saddles. His half-boots would need to
be new fronted, and abbreviated for the third time, before the arrival of the
impending shooting-match day; and of the necessary requisites for the
performance of that operation the only one in existence was the artist, Fecht

the cobbler. In short, for that important occasion he had nothing to put on
his back or in his pocket, his bullet-pouch, or his powder-horn.
When a man intentionally works his anxieties and apprehensions up to
the highest possible pitch, some consolation is sure to fall upon his heart
from heaven, like a drop of warm rain. Siebenkæs began catechising
himself more strictly, asking himself what it really was that he was
tormenting himself about. Nothing but the fear of having to go to the
shooting-match without money, without powder and shot, and without
having had his boots abbreviated for the third time! “Is that really all?” he
said. “And what, if you please, is there to make it a compulsory matter that
I should go there at all? I’ll tell you what it is” (he went on to himself), “I
am the monkey complaining bitterly that, having stuck his hand into a
narrow-mouthed bottle of rice, and filled it, he can’t pull it out without a
corkscrew. All I’ve got to do is to sell my rifle and my shooting ticket; all
I’ve got to do is to open my hand and draw it out empty.” So he made up his
mind to take his rifle to the barber on the day of the auction to be put up to
sale.
All battered, bruised, and weary with the day, he climbed into his bed,
with the thought of which safe and sheltered anchoring ground he consoled
himself all day long. “There is this blessed property about night,” he said,
as he sat and spread the feathers of his quilt level, “that while it lasts we
need trouble ourselves neither about candles, coals, victuals, drink, debts,
nor clothes; all we want is a bed. A poor fellow is in peace and comfort as
long as he is lying down: and, luckily, he has only got to stand for half of
his time.”
The attacks of syncope, to which our souls and our cheerfulness are
subject, cease, as those of the body do (according to Zimmermann), when
the patient is placed in a horizontal position.
Had his bed been provided with bed-tassel, I should have called it the
capstan, whereby he heaved himself slowly up on the Monday morning
from his resting place. When he got up, he ascended to the garret, where his
rifle was nailed up in an old, long field-chest, to keep it safe. This rifle was
a valuable legacy from his father, who had been huntsman and gun-loader
to a great prince of the empire. He took a crowbar, and, using it as a lever,
prised up the lid with its roots, i. e. nails; and the first thing he saw in it was

a leather arm, which “gave him quite a turn;” for he had had many a good
thrashing from that arm in bygone days.
It will not take me too far out of my way to expend a word or two on this
subject. This full-dress arm had been borne by Siebenkæs’s father on his
body (as it might be in the field of his escutcheon) ever since the time when
he had lost his natural arm in the military service of the before-mentioned
prince, who, as some slight reward, had got him his appointment as gun-
loader to his corps of Jägers. The gun-loader wore this auxiliary arm
fastened to a hook on his left shoulder; it being more like the arm of a
Hussar’s pelisse, or an elongated glove, worn by way of ornament, than as a
mouth Christian of an arm (pretending to be what it was not). In the
education of his children, however, the leather arm served, to some extent,
the purpose of a school library and Bible Society, and was the collaborateur
of the fleshly arm. Every-day shortcomings—for instance, when Firmian
made a mistake in his multiplication, or rode on the pointer dog, or ate
gunpowder, or broke a pipe—were punished not severely, that is, only with
a stick, which in all good schools runs up the backs of the children by way
of capillary sap-vessel or siphon, to supply the nourishing juice of
knowledge; or is the carriage-pole to which entire winter-schools are
harnessed, and at which they tug with a will. But there were two other sorts
of transgressions which he punished more severely. When one of the
children laughed at table during meals, or hesitated, or made a blunder
during the long table-grace or evening prayers, he would immediately
amputate his adventitious arm with his natural one, and administer a
tremendous thrashing to the little darling.
Firmian remembered, as if it had happened yesterday, one occasion when
he and his sisters had been thrashed, turn about, for a whole half-hour at
dinner-time with the battle-flail, because one of them began to laugh while
the long muscle was swishing about the ears of another, who was serious
enough. The sight of the bit of leather made his heart burn even at this day. I
can quite see the advantage to parents and teachers who try the expedient of
unhooking an empty by an organic arm, and smiting a pupil with this
species of Concordat, and alliance between the temporal and spiritual arms;
but this mode of punishment ought to be invariably the one made use of; for
there is nothing which infuriates children more than anything new in the
way of instruments of punishment, or a new mode of application of those in
general use. A child who is accustomed to rulers and blows on the back,

must not be set upon with boxes on the ear and bare hands; nor one
accustomed to the latter treated to the former. The author of these Flower-
pieces had once a slipper thrown at him in his earlier days. The scar of that
slipper is still fresh in his heart, whereas he has scarcely any recollection of
lickings of the ordinary sort.
Siebenkæs pulled the arm of punishment and the rifle out of the chest;
but what a treasure trove there was beneath them! Here was help, indeed!
At all events he could go to the shooting-match in shorter boots, and eat
whatever he liked for some days to come. What most astonishes both him
and me in this affair (it is easily explicable, however) is that he had never
thought of it sooner, inasmuch as his father was a Jäger; while, on the other
hand, I must confess it could not have happened on a luckier day, because it
chanced to be just the day of the auction.
The hunting spear, the horse’s tail, the decoy bird, the fox-trap, the
couteau de chasse, the medicine-chest, the fencing mask and foil—a
collection of things which he had never had a thought of looking for in the
chest—could be taken over instantly to the town-house, and set up to
auction on the spot by the hairdressing Saxon.
It was done accordingly. After all his troubles, the little piece of good
luck warmed and gladdened his heart. He went himself after the box—
which was sent just as it stood to the auction, except that the rifle and the
leathern artery were kept back—to hear what would be offered for the
things.
He took up his position (on account of the excessive length of his half-
boots) at the back of the auctioneer’s table, close to his hectic landlord. The
sight of this pile of heterogeneous goods and chattels all heaped up
higgledy-piggledy (as if some grand conflagration were raging, and it had
been collected in haste for safety; or as if it were the plunder of some
captured city), goods and chattels sold, for the most part, by people on the
downward path to poverty, and bought by those who had arrived at poverty
already—had the effect of making him contemn and despise more every
moment all this complex pumping apparatus, this machinery for keeping the
spring-wells of a few petty, feeble lives in clear and vigorous flow; and he
himself, the engineer and driver of this machinery, felt his sense of
manliness grow stronger. He was furious with himself, because his soul had

seemed yesterday to be but a sham jewel, which a drop of aquafortis
deprives of its colour and lustre, whereas a real jewel never loses either.
Nothing awakens our humour more, nor renders us more utterly
indifferent to the honour paid to mere rank and worldly position, than our
being in any manner compelled to fall back upon the honour due to
ourselves (independently of our chance position), our own intrinsic worth,
our being compelled to tar over our inner being with philosophy (as if it
were a Diogenes’ tub), by way of protection against injuries from without;
or (in a prettier metaphor) when, like pearl oysters, we have to exude pearls
of maxims to fill the holes which worms bore in our mother-of-pearl. Now
pearls are better than uninjured mother-of-pearl; an idea which I should like
to have written in letters of gold.
I have good reasons of my own for prefacing what has to follow with all
this philosophy, because I want to get the reader into such a frame of mind
that he may not make too great a fuss about what the advocate is going to
do now: it was really nothing but a harmless piece of fun. As the be-
powdered lungs of the auctioneer were more adapted to wheezing and
coughing than to shouting, he took the auction-hammer from this hammer-
man and sold off the things himself. True, he only did it for about half an
hour, and only auctioned his own things; and even then he would have
thought twice about taking the hammer in hand and setting to work, if it
hadn’t been such an indescribable delight to him to hold up the horse’s tail,
the spear, the decoy-bird, &c., and hammer on the table and cry, “Four
groschen for the horse’s tail, once! five kreuzer for the decoy, twice!—
going! Half-a dollar for the fox-trap, once! two gulden for this fine foil,
twice! two gulden—going—going—and gone!” He did what it is an
auctioneer’s duty to do, he praised the goods. He turned the horse’s tail over
and over, and opened it out before the huntsmen who were at the sale (the
shooting-match had attracted many from a distance, as carrion does
vultures), stroked it with and against the hair, and said there was enough of
it to make snares for all the blackbirds in the Black Forest. He held up the
decoy-bird in its best light, exhibiting to the company its wooden beak, its
wings, talons, and feathers, and only wished there were a hawk present, that
he might bait the decoy and lure it.
The entries in his housekeeping account-book, which, on account of the
wretchedness of my memory, I have had to refer to twice, show that the

sum received from the huntsmen amounted to seven florins and some
groschen. This does not include the medicine-chest nor the long-necked
mask; for nobody would have anything to say to them. When he went home
he poured the whole of this crown-treasure and sinking-fund into Lenette’s
gold satchel, taking occasion to warn her and himself of the dangers of
great riches, and holding up to both the example of those who are arrogant
by reason of wealth, and must therefore of necessity, sooner or later, come
to ruin.
In my Seventh Chapter, which I shall commence immediately, I shall at
length be able, after all these thousands of domestic worries and miseries, to
conduct the learned world of Germany to the shooting-ground and present
to them my hero as a worthy member of the shooting-club, with a rifle and
bullets, and properly and respectably—well, booted, more than attired for
his bullets are cast, his rifle cleaned, and his boots have put on their shoes,
Fecht having stitched, on his knee, the three-quarter boots down to half-
boots, and soled them with the—leather arm, of which enough has been
said already.

CHAPTER VII.

THE SHOOTING-MATCH—ROSA’S AUTUMNAL CAMPAIGN—
CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING CURSES, KISSES, AND THE
MILITIA.

There is nothing which so much inconveniences me, or is so much to the
prejudice of this story (so beautiful in itself), as the fact that I have made a
resolution to restrict it within the compass of four alphabets. I have thus, by
my own act, deprived myself of everything in the shape of room for
digressions. I find myself, metaphorically, in a somewhat similar position to
one which I once found myself in, without metaphor, on an occasion when I
was measuring the diameter and circumference of the town of Hof. On that
occasion I had fastened a Catel’s pedometer by a hook to the waistband of
my trousers and the silken cord which runs down the thigh to a curved hook
of steel at my knee, so that the three indexes on one dial (of which the first
marks a hundred steps, the second a thousand, and the third up to twenty
thousand) were all moving just as I moved myself. At this moment I met a
young lady, whom it was incumbent on me that I should see home. I begged
her to excuse me, as I had a Catel’s pedometer on, and had already made a
certain number of steps towards my measurement of the diameter of Hof.
“You see, in a moment,” I said, “how I am situated. The pedometer, like a
species of conscience, records all the steps I take; and, with a lady, I shall be
obliged to take shorter steps, besides thousands of sideway and backward
steps, all of which the pedometer will put to the account of the diameter. So,
you see, I am afraid it’s quite impossible that I can have the pleasure of
——” However, this only made her the more determined that I should, and
I was well laughed at; but I screwed myself to the spot, and wouldn’t stir. At
last I said I would go home with her, pedometer and all, if she would just
read off my indexes for me (seeing I couldn’t twist myself down low
enough to see the dial)—read them off for me twice—firstly, then and there,

and secondly, when we got to her house—so that I might deduct the steps
taken by me in this young lady’s company from the size of Hof. This
agreement was honestly kept; and this little account of the occurrence may
be of service to me some day if ever I publish (as I have not given up all
hopes of doing) my perspective sketch of the town of Hof; and townspeople
who saw me walking with the said young lady, and with the pedometer
trailing at my knee, might cast it in my teeth and say it was a lame affair,
and that nobody could calculate as to the steps he might take in a lady’s
company, far less apply them to the measurement of a town.
St. Andrew’s Day was bright and fine, and not very windy. It was
tolerably warm, and there wasn’t as much snow in the furrows as would
have cooled a nutshell of wine, or knocked over a humming-bird. On the
previous Tuesday Siebenkæs had been looking on with the other spectators,
when the bird-pole had described its majestic arc in descending to impale
the black golden eagle with outstretched wings, and rise again therewith on
high. He felt some emotion as the thought struck him, “That bird of prey up
there holds in his claws, and will dispense, the happiness or the misery of
thy Lenette’s coming weeks, and our goddess of Fortune has transformed
herself and dwindled into that black form, nothing left of her but her WINGS
and BALL.”

On St. Andrew’s morning, as he said good-bye to Lenette, with kisses,
and in his abbreviated boots, over which he had a pair of goloshes, she said,
“May God grant you luck, and not let you do any mischief with your rifle.”
She asked several times if there was nothing he had forgotten—his
eyeglass, or his handkerchief, or his purse; “And mind you don’t get into
any quarrel with Mr. von Meyern,” was her parting counsel: and finally, as
one or two preliminary thundrous drum-ruffles were heard from the
direction of the courthouse, she added most anxiously, “For God’s sake,
mind and don’t shoot yourself; my blood will run cold the whole forenoon
every time I hear a gun go off!”
At length the long thread of riflemen, rolled up like a ball, began to
unwind itself, and the waving line, like a great serpent, moved off in
surging convolutions to the sound of trumpets and drums. A banner
represented the serpent’s crest, and the standard-bearer’s coat was like a
second flag beneath the other. The town-soldiery, more remarkable for
quality than for quantity, shot the mottled line of competitors at intervals

with the white of their uniforms. The auctioneering hairdresser—the only
member of the lower ten thousand who rejoiced in a powdered head—
tripped along, keeping the white peak of his cap at the due degree of
distance from the leather pigtails of the aristocracy, which he had that
morning tied and powdered. The multitude felt what a lofty position in this
world really was, when, with bent heads, they raised their eyes to
Heimlicher von Blaise, the director of the competition, who accompanied
the procession in his capacity of aorta of the whole arterial system, or
elementary fire of all these ignes-fatui—or, in a word, as master of the
shooters’ lodge. Happy was the wife who peeped out and saw her husband
marching past in the procession—happy was Lenette, for her husband was
there, and looked gallantly up as he passed by. His short boots looked very
nice, indeed; they were made both in the old fashion and in the new, and,
like man, had put on the new (short) Adam over the old one.
I wish Schulrath Stiefel had given a thought or so to the St. Andrew’s
shooting-match, and looked out of his window at his Orestes; however, he
went on with his reviewing.
Now, when these processional caterpillars had crept together again at the
shooting-ground, as upon a leaf—when the eagle hung in his heavenly
eyrie, like the crest of the future’s armorial bearings—when the wind
instruments, which the troop of “wandering minstrels” had scarce been able
to hold firmly to their lips, blared out their loudest now that the band was
halted, and as the procession, with martial tramp and rattle of grounded
rifles, came with a rush into the empty echoing shooting-house, everybody,
strictly speaking, was more or less out of his senses, and mentally
intoxicated; and that although the lots were not even drawn, far less any
shot fired. Siebenkæs said to himself, “The whole thing is stuff and
nonsense, yet see how it has gone to all our heads, and how a mere
unbroken faded flower-wreath of pleasant trifles, wound ten times about our
hearts, half chokes and darkens them. Our thirsty heart is made of loose,
absorptive mould; a warm shower makes it swell, and as it expands it
cracks the roots of all the plants that are growing in it.”
Mr. von Blaise, who smiled unceasingly upon my hero, and treated the
others with the rudeness becoming authority, ordered the lots to be drawn
which were to decide the order in which the competitors were to shoot. The
reader cannot expect Chance to stop the wheel of Fortune, thrust in her

hand, and, behind her bandage, pull out from among seventy numbers the
very first for the advocate; she drew him the twelfth, however. And at
length the brave Germans and imperial citizens opened fire upon the Roman
eagle. At first they aimed at his crown. The eagerness and zeal of these
pretenders were proportioned to the importance of the affair: was there not a
royal revenue of six florins attached to this golden penthouse when the
bullet brought it down—to say nothing whatever of other crown property,
consisting of three pounds of tow and a pewter shaving-dish. The fellows
did what they could; but the rifle placed the crown of the eagle, not, alas! on
our hero’s head, but upon that of No. 11, his predecessor, the hectic Saxon.
He had need of it, poor fellow! seeing that, like a Prince of Wales, he had
come into possession of the crown debts sooner than of the crown itself.
At a shooting contest of this kind nothing is better calculated to dissipate
everything in the shape of tedium than to have arrangements made for
“running shooting” (as it is called) being carried on by those who are
waiting their turn at the birdpole. A man who has to wait while sixty-nine
other people slowly aim and shoot before his turn comes round, may find a
good deal to amuse him if, during that time, he can load and aim at
something of a less lofty kind—for instance, a Capuchin general. The
“running” or “swing” shooting, as carried out at Kuhschnappel, differs in no
respect from that of other places. A piece of canvas is hung up, and floats to
and fro; there are painted dishes of edibles upon it, as on a table-cloth, and
whoever puts a bullet through one of these paintings obtains the original—
just as princes choose their brides from their portraits, before bringing home
the brides in person; or as witches stick pins into a man’s image in order to
wound the prototype himself. The Kuhschnappelers were, on this occasion,
shooting at a portrait on this canvas, which a great many persons considered
to represent a Capuchin general. I know that there were some who, basing
their opinion chiefly upon the red hat in the portrait, considered it to
represent a cardinal, or cardinal-protector, but these have clearly, in the first
place, got to settle the point with a third party, which differed from both of
those above mentioned, holding that it portrayed the whore of Babylon—
that is to say, a European one. From all of which we may form a pretty
accurate estimate of the amount of truth contained in another rumour—
which I contradicted in the first hour of its existence—namely, that the
Augsburg people had taken offence at this effigy-arquebusading, and had
written, in consequence, to the attorney-general representing that they felt

themselves aggrieved, and that it was an injustice to one religion if, within
the bounds of the holy Roman empire, a general of a religious order should
be shot to shivers, without a Lutheran superintendent general being also
shot to shivers at the same time. I should certainly have heard something
further about this, if it had been anything but mere wind. Indeed, I have a
shrewd suspicion that the whole story is no more than a false tradition, or
garbled version of another story, which a gentleman of rank belonging to
Vienna recently lied to me at table. What he said was, that in the more
considerable towns of the empire, where the spirit-level of religious
toleration has established a beautiful equilibrium between Papists and
Lutherans, many had complained, on the part of the Lutherans, of the
circumstance that although there were equal numbers of night-watchmen
and censors (that is, transcendental night-watchmen), keepers of hotels, and
keepers of circulating libraries of each communion, yet there were more
Papists hanged than Lutherans; so that it was very clear, whether the Jesuits
had to do with it or not, that a high and important post such as the gallows
was not filled with the same amount of impartiality as the Council of State,
but with a certain bias towards the Catholics. I thought of contradicting the
story, in the most distinct terms, in the ‘Literary Gazette’ of December last,
but Government declined to pay the expense of the insertion.
However, although those who occupied themselves with the “swing”
shooting did only have a Capuchin to aim at, the said swing shooting was
every bit as important a business as the shooting at the standing mark. I
must point out (in this connection) that there were edible prizes attached to
the divers bodily members of this said general of his order, which had their
attractions for riflemen of a reflective turn of mind. An entire Bohemian
porker was the prize appointed for him who should pierce the heart of the
Capuchin pasha—which heart, however, was represented by a spot no
bigger than a beauty-patch—so that he who should hit this little mark would
have need of all his skill and nerve. The cardinal’s hat was easier of
attainment, for which reason it was worth only a couple of jack. The
honorarium of the oculist who should succeed in inserting new (leaden)
pupils into the cardinal’s eyes consisted of an equivalent number of geese.
As he was portrayed in the full fervour of prayer, it was well worth
anyone’s while to send a bullet through between his hands, seeing that this
would be tantamount to knocking the two fore-quarters out of a cantering,
smoked pig. And each of the cardinal’s feet rested upon a fine hind-quarter

or ham. I do not hesitate for a moment—whatever the imperial burgh of
Kuhschnappel may say to it—to record, with the utmost distinctness, that
no portion of the whole lord-protector was more poorly endowed, or had a
scantier revenue and salarium allotted to it, than his navel; for there was
nothing to be got out of that, with however good a bullet, but a Bologna
sausage.
The advocate had failed in his designs upon the crown; but fortune
chucked him the cardinal’s hat to make up for it—the cardinal’s hat with
two pike inside it. But some puissant necromantic spell of invulnerability
turned all his bullets aside from the eagle’s head, and from the general’s too.
He would fain have sent one eye, at any rate, out of the face of the harlot of
Babylon, but he could not manage that either.
Now the prize-lists—which are correct, seeing that they were made out
by the secretary, under the eyes of the president, Herr von Blaise—state
with distinctness that the head, the ring in the beak, and the little flag, fell
into the hands of numbers 16, 2, and 63.
The sceptre was now being aimed at; and Siebenkæs would have been
very very glad, for his dear little wife’s sake (waiting for him now, as she
was, with the soup), to have sent that, at least, flying out of the eagle’s
talons, and to have fixed it, by way of a bayonet, on to his rifle.
All the numbers who had tried their best to break off this golden oak-
branch had shot in vain, except the worst—the most to be dreaded of all—
his own predecessor and landlord. He aimed, and shot—and the gilded
harpoon quivered. Siebenkæs fired—and the eel-spear came tumbling
down.
Messrs. Meyern and Blaise smiled, and uttered congratulations; the
blowers of instruments, crooked and straight, blew, in honour of the advent
of this new bird-member, a blast both loud and shrill (like the Karlsbad
people, when a new bath-guest arrives), looking closely and carefully at
their music as they did so, though they had played their little fanfares far
oftener than the very night-watchmen. All the infantas—I mean all the
children—began a race for the sceptre, but the buffoon dashed among them,
and scattered them; and, taking up the sceptre, presented that emblem of
sovereignty to the advocate with one hand, holding in the other his own
emblem of sovereignty, the whip.

Siebenkæs contemplated with a smile the little twig of timber—the little
branch, sticking to which the buzzing swarms of nations are so often borne
away; and he veiled his satisfaction under cover of the following satirical
remarks (which the reigning Heimlicher overheard, and applied to himself):
—
“A very pretty little frog-shooter! It ought, by rights, to be a honey-
gauge; but the poor bees are crushed by it, that their honey-bags may be got
out of them! The Waiwodes and the despots, child-like, put the bees of the
country to death, and take the honey from their stomachs, not from, their
combs. A truly preposterous and absurd implement! It is made of wood;
very likely a piece broken off a shepherd’s crook, and gilded, pointed, and
notched—one of those shepherd’s staves with which the shepherds often
drag the sheep’s fat out of them while they are feeding in the meadows!”
He had ceased to be conscious, now, when he emitted the bitterest
satirical matter (there was never a drop of it in his heart); he often turned
mere acquaintances into foes with some joke, made merely for the sake of
jesting; and couldn’t imagine what made people vexed with him, and why it
was that he couldn’t have his little bit of fun with them as well as any one
else.
He put the sceptre into the breast of his coat and took it home, seeing that
they would not shoot up to his number again before dinner-time. He held it
up straight and stiff, as the king of diamonds holds his, and said to Lenette,
“There’s a soup-ladle and sugar-tongs for you, all in one!” the allusion
being to the two pewter prizes, which, in company with a sum of nine
florins, had fallen to his share by way of sceptre-fief. It was enough for one
shot. And next he gave an account of the catching of the pike. He expected
that Lenette would, at the very least, go through the five dancing positions
and execute Euler’s “knight’s move” on the chess-board of the room-floor,
into the bargain, within the first five seconds after hearing the news. She did
what she could do, namely, nothing at all; and said what she knew, namely,
that the landlady had been holding forth, with bitter severity, to the
bookseller’s wife, on the subject of the non-payment of the rent, and further,
concerning her own husband, whom she characterised as a smooth-tongued
flatterer and payer of compliments—a man who didn’t half threaten people.
“What I tell you,” repeated the sceptre-bearer, “is, that I have this day had
the luck to shoot a couple of pikes and a sceptre, Wendeline Engelkraut!”

and he banged his sceptre-knout in indignation upon the table where the
crockery was all set out. She answered at last, “Well, Lucas came running a
short time ago and told me all about that; I am so glad about it, but I should
quite think you will shoot a good many more things yet—will you not? I
said so to the bookseller’s wife.”
She was slipping into her old cart-rut again, you see, but Firmian thought,
“She can cry and mourn loud enough, but deuce a bit of gladness can she
show when a fellow comes home with a pike or two under his arm, and a
sceptre or so.” It was just the same with the wife of the gentle-hearted
Racine, when he threw down a long purse of golden Louis XVI. he had got
hold of, on the table.
How, or whence, oh! beloved wives, cometh to you the naughty trick ye
have of making a kind of parade of an insupportable frigidity and
indifference, just on the very occasions when your husbands come to you
laden with good news, or with presents—that at the very moment when Fate
brightens the wine of your joy into “bloom,” your vats grow turbid with the
lees of the old liquor? Comes it from your custom of showing only one of
your faces at a time, like your sister and prototype, the moon? or from a
peevish discontent with destiny? or is its cause a sweet, delicious,
overflowing happiness and gladness, making the heart too full and the
tongue too hard to move?
I believe it is often from all these causes combined.
In men, again—sometimes, too, in women, but only in one out of a
thousand—it may arise from the sad thought of the sharks which tear off the
arm with which, down in the dark ocean, all breathless and anxious, we
have clasped hold of four pearls of happiness. Or, perhaps, from a deeper
question still. Is not our heart’s inward bliss but an olive-leaf which a dove
brings to us, fluttering over the great deluge foaming and seething all round
us—an olive-leaf which she has culled for us away in the far distant
Paradise, high up above the flood, clear and blissful in the eternal sun? And
if all we attain of that whole olive-garden is but one leaf, instead of all its
flowers and its fruit, is this leaf of peace, is this dove of peace, to give to us
something beyond peace—namely, hope?
Firmian went back to the shooting-ground, his breast full of growing
hopes. The heart of man, which, in matters of chance, makes its calculations
in direct defiance of the theory of probabilities, and when heads have turned

up once, expects them three times running—(although what ought to be
anticipated is the very reverse)—or reckons upon hitting the eagle’s talon
became it has knocked the sceptre out of it—this heart of man,
uncontrollable alike in its fears and in its hopes, the advocate took with him
to the shooters’ trench.
He came not by the talons, however. And at the folded praying claws or
hands of the general of the Capuchins—these algebraic exponents or
heraldic devices of two forequarters of pork—aimed he alike in vain.
It mattered not; more was left of the eagle, when all was done, than
would be this day of Poland, if the latter, or its coat of arms—a silver eagle
in a bloody field—were to be set up on a throne or a bird-pole, and shot at
by a shooting-club composed of an army or two.
Even the imperial globe was not yet knocked down. Number 69, a
formidable foregoer, Mr. Everard Rosa von Meyern, had taken his aim—
eager to cull this forbidden fruit—a Ribstone pippin and football fit for a
very prince, such as this imperial apple, was a thing of too great price to be
grasped for the sake of what was to be gained along with it—’twas honour
alone that fired his heart—he pulled his trigger, and he might just as well
have aimed in the opposite direction. Rosa—this particular apple being too
high out of his reach—went, all blushes, in among the lady spectators,
dealing out apples of Paris all round, and telling each lady how lovely she
was, that she might be convinced how handsome he was himself. In the
eyes of a woman, her panegyrist is, firstly, a very clever man, and, ere long,
such a nice-LOOKING one. Rosa knew that grains of incense are the anise
which these doves fly after, as though infatuated.
Our friend had no need to disquiet himself about any of the would-be
fruit-gatherers—about the second, eighth, or ninth, till it came to the
eleventh—and he was the Saxon, who shot like the demon in person. There
were few among the seventy who didn’t wish this accursed gallows-number
at the deuce, or at all events into the vegetable kingdom, where it is
altogether absent.[50] The hairdresser fired, struck the eagle on the leg, and
the leg remained hanging aloft, with the imperial globe in the talons.
His lodger (and lawyer) came up to the scratch, but the landlord stood
still in the trench, to satisfy his soul with curses of his luckless star. As the
former levelled the sights of his rifle upon the ball above, he made up his

mind that he would not aim at the ball at all, but at the eagle’s tail, so as
simply to shake the apple down.
In one second the worm-eaten world-apple fell. The Saxon cursed
beyond all description.
Siebenkæs all but offered up an inward prayer, not because a pewter
mustard-pot, a sugar-dish, and five florins came showering along with the
apple into his lap, but for the piece of good luck—for the warm burst of
sunshine which thus came breaking out from among the clouds of the
distant storm. “Thou wouldst prove this soul of mine, happy Fortune,”
thought he, “and thou placest it, as men do watches, in all positions—
perpendicular and horizontal, quiet and unquiet—to see if it will go and
mark the time correctly in all, or no. Ay, truly! it shall!”
He let this little, bright, miniature earth-ball roll from one hand to the
other, spinning and weaving, as he did so, the following brief chain of
syllogisms:—“What a genealogical tree of copies! Nothing but pictures
within pictures comedies within comedies! The emperor’s globe is an
emblem of this terrestrial globe of ours—the core of each is a handful of
earth—and this emperor’s globe of mine, again, is a miniature emblem of a
real emperor’s, with even less of earth—none at all, in fact. The mustard-
pot and sugar-dish, again, are emblems of this emblem. What a long,
diminishing series, ere man arrives at enjoyment!” Most of man’s pleasures
are but preparations for pleasure; he thinks he has attained his ends, when
he has merely got hold of his means to those ends. The burning sun of bliss
is beheld of our feeble eyes but in the seventy mirrors of our seventy years.
Each of these mirrors reflects that sun’s image less brightly—more faint and
pale—upon the next; and in the seventieth it shimmers upon us all frozen,
and is become a moon.
He ran home, but without his globe, for he did not mean to tell her of that
till the evening. It was a great refreshment to him to slip, during his
shooting vacations, away from the public turmoil to his quiet little chamber,
give a rapid narrative of anything of importance going on, and then cast
himself back into the mêlée. As his number was a next-door neighbour to
Rosa’s, and they had, consequently, their holidays at the same time, it
surprises me that he did not come upon Herr von Meyern beneath his own
window, inasmuch as that gentleman was walking up and down there, with
his head elevated, like an ant. He who desires to destroy a young gentleman

of this species, let him look for him under (if not in) a lady’s window; just
as an experienced gardener, when he wants to kill woodlice or earwigs,
needs only lift up his flower-pots to annihilate them by the score.
Siebenkæs did not hit so much as another shaving the whole of the
afternoon; even the very tail, which he had attacked with such success in his
bold stroke for the conquest of the globe of the holy Roman empire, resisted
all his efforts to knock it off. He let himself be drummed and fifed home by
the town militia towards evening. When he got to his wife’s door, he there
assumed the rôle of Knecht Ruprecht (the children’s “Bogie,” who, on St.
Andrew’s Day, bestows upon them, for the first time in their career, fruit,
and fear along with the same), and, growling in a terrible manner, chucked
his (wooden) apple in to her; a piece of fun which delighted her immensely.
But really I ought not to record such little trifles.
As Firmian laid his head on his pillow, he said to his wife, “This time to-
morrow, wife, we shall know if it be two crowned heads that we are going
to lay on the pillow, or not! I shall just recall this important minute to your
memory to-morrow night, when we’re going to bed!” When he got up in the
morning he said, “Very likely this is the last time that I shall rise a common,
ordinary person, without a crown.”
He was so anxious to have the mutilated bird (all wet with dew, a mass of
gunshot wounds and compound fractures) once more before his bodily eyes,
that he hardly knew how to possess himself in patience till the time came.
But it was only as long as he did not see the eagle that his hopes of shooting
himself into a king at him endured. He was, therefore, delighted to agree to
a proposal made by the clever Saxon, whose bullet had throughout the
proceedings always cleared the way for his number-neighbour’s; the
proposal was, “we go shares in gains and in losses—in the bird and in the
cardinal.” This copartnership doubled the advocate’s hopes by the process
of halving them.
But these companions in arms didn’t bring down a single painted splinter
the whole of the afternoon. Each in his secret heart thought the other was
the bird of evil omen; for in matters of chance we are prone to hang our
faith upon a bit of superstition, rather than to nothing at all. The fickle
Babylonish harlot went fluttering off with that amount of bashful coyness,
that the hairdresser once sent a bullet within an ace of the fellow who was
working her backwards and forwards.

At last, however, in the afternoon, he sent his Cupid’s dart right through
that black heart of hers, and, by consequence, through the pig at the same
time. This almost terrified Firmian; he said that if he couldn’t hit anything
himself he would accept only the head of this pig—this polypus in the heart
of the Babylonian fille de joie. All that was left of the bird was its torso,
which stuck to its perch like the very Rump Parliament, which these
pretenders to the crown would so fain have dissolved.
A regular running musketry fusilade of eager interest, enthusiasm,
emulation, now went flashing from breast to breast, fanned by every puff of
powder which rose in smoke as a rifle went off. When the bird shook a little
all the competitors shook also, except Herr von Meyern, who had gone off,
and—seeing what a state of excitement everybody was in, especially our
hero—marched away to Madame Siebenkæs, thinking that he had a better
chance of becoming, in that quarter, king of a queen than he had here of
acquiring the sovereignty of the riflemen. However, my readers and I shall
slip into the Siebenkæs’ chamber after him presently.
Twice already had the seventy numbers loaded in vain for the decisive
shot; the obstinate stump still stuck glued to its perch, and scarce so much
as trembled; the poor tantalised hearts were torn and pierced by every bullet
that sped on its course. Their fears waxed apace, so did their hopes, but
most of all their curses (those brief ejaculatory prayers to the devil). The
theologians of the seventh decade of the present century had the devil often
enough in their pens—in their denials or in their assertions of him—but the
Kuhschnappelers had him far oftener in their mouths, particularly the upper
classes.
Seneca, in his ‘Remedies for Anger,’ has omitted the simplest of all, the
devil. True, the Kabbalists highly extol the therapeutic powers of the word
Shemhamphorash, which is a name of a diametrically opposite character;
but I have observed, for my part, that the spotted, malignant fever of wrath,
so readily diagnosed by the raving delirium of the patient, is instantly
relieved, dispersed, and mitigated, by invoking the name of the devil, which
is perhaps, indeed, quite as efficacious a remedy as the wearing of amulets.
In the absence of this name, the ancients, who were altogether without a
Satan, recommended a mere repetition of the A B C, which, it is true, does
contain the devil’s name, only too much diluted with other letters. And the
word Abracadabra, spoken diminuendo, was a cure for corporeal fevers. As

regards the inflammatory fever of anger, however, the greater the quantity
of morbid matter which has to be ejected from the system through the
secretions of the mouth, the greater is the number of devils necessary to
make mention of. For a mere trifling irritation—a mild case of simple anger
—“the devil,” or perhaps “hell and the devil,” will generally be found
sufficient; but for the pleuritic fever of rage I should be disposed to
prescribe “the devil and his infernal grandmother:” strengthening the dose,
moreover, with a “donnerwetter” or two, and a few “sacraments,” as the
curative powers of the electric fluid are now so generally recognised. It is
unnecessary to point out to me that in cases of absolute canine fury or
maniacal wrath, doses of the specific, such as the foregoing, are of little
avail; I should, of course, let a patient in this condition be “taken and torn
by all the devils in hell.” But what I would fain render clear is that, in all
these remedies, the real specific is the devil; for as it is his sting which is the
cause of our malady, he himself has got to be employed as the remedy, just
as the stings of scorpions are cured by the application of scorpions in
powder.
The tumult of anticipation shook up the aristocracy and the sixpenny
gallery into one common whole. On occasions like this—as also in the
chase and in agricultural operations—the aristocracy forget what they are,
viz., something better than the citizen classes. An aristocrat should, in my
opinion, never for a moment lose sight of the fact that his position with
reference to the common herd is that which the actor now a days stands in
with respect to the chorus. In the time of Thespis the whole of the tragedy
was sung and acted by the chorus, while one single actor, called the
protagonist, delivered a speech or two, unaccompanied by any music,
bearing on the subject of the play. Æschylus introduced a second actor, the
deuteragonist; Sophocles even a third, the tritagonist. In more recent times
the actors have been retained, but the chorus omitted, unless we consider
those who applaud to represent it. In a similar manner also, in this world of
ours (mankind’s natural theatre), the chorus, i. e. the people, has been
gradually cleared off the stage, only with more advantage than in the case of
smaller theatrical ones, and promoted from taking part in the action of the
drama (which the protagonists (princes), deuteragonists (ministers), and
tritagonists (people of quality), are better fit to do), to the post of spectators
who criticise and applaud—what was the chorus in Athens, now sitting at

ease in the pit, near the orchestra, and before the stage where the great
“business” is going on.
By this time it was past two o’clock, and the afternoons were brief; yet
the saucy bird would not stir. Everybody swore that the carpenter who had
hatched it from its native block was a low scoundrel, and must have carved
it out of tough branchwood. But at last, all battered, with nearly the whole
of its paint broken away from it, it did appear to be somewhat disposed to
topple down. The hairdresser, who, like the common herd in general, was
conscientious towards individuals only, not towards an aggregation of them,
now without any scruple secretly doubled his bullets (since he could not
double his rifle), putting in one for himself and one for his brother in arms,
in the hope that this decomposing medium might have the effect of
precipitating the eagle. “The devil and his infernal grandmother!” cried he,
when he had fired his shot, making use of the febrifuge or cooling draught
above alluded to. He now had to place all his trust in his lodger, to whom he
handed his rifle. Siebenkæs fired, and the Saxon cried, “Ten thousand
devils!” doubling in vain the dose of devils, as he had the dose of bullets.
They now, in despair, laid aside their rifles and also their hopes; for there
were more pretenders to this crown than there were to that of Rome in the
time of Galienus, when there were but thirty. This shooting septuaginta had
all telescopes at their eyes (when they had not rifles there), that they might
observe how there were a greater number of bullets in this heaven-
suspended constellation of theirs than there are stars in the astronomical one
of the eagle. The faces of all beholders were now turned towards this
Keblah of a bird, like those of the Jews towards their ruined Jerusalem.
Even old Sabel sat behind her table of sweetmeats customerless, and gazing
up at the eagle. The earlier numbers didn’t even give themselves the trouble
of shaking a pinch of powder into their pans.
Firmian pitied these oppressed hearts, swimming heavily in turbid, earthy
blood—for whom at this time, the setting sun, the bright array of sky tints,
and the broad, fair world were all invisible—or, rather, all shrivelled up to a
battered block of wood. The surest token that these hearts were all lying
fettered in the eternal dungeon of need and necessity, was that none could
make a single witty allusion either to the bird or the kingship. It is only
concerning matters which leave our souls free and unshackled that we
notice similitudes and connection.

“This bird,” thought Firmian, “is the decoy of all these men, and the
money is what baits the lure.” But he himself had three reasons for desiring
to be king: firstly, to laugh himself to death at his own coronation; secondly,
on account of his Lenette: thirdly, on account of the Saxon.
The second half of the seventy gradually fired off, and the earlier
numbers began to load again, if it were for nothing but the fun of the thing.
Every one put in two bullets now. Our two Hanseatic confederates came
once more up to the mark, and Siebenkæs borrowed a more powerful glass,
screwing it on to his rifle like the finder of a telescope.
No. 10 loosened the bird from its joining to the pole. Nothing but the
sheer weight of it now retained it on its perch, for they had well nigh
saturated and incrusted the wood of it with lead (as certain springs
transform wood into iron).
The Saxon had but to graze the eagle-torso—ay, or even the perch of it—
nay, the very evening breeze had but to give an extra puff—to send the bird
of prey swooping down. He had his rifle to his shoulder—aimed for a
whole eternity (there were fifty florins hanging in the sky)—and pulled his
trigger. The powder flashed in the pan. The band had all their trumpets
ready at their lips—trumpets horizontal, music perpendicular—the boys
stood round ready to seize the fallen skeleton; the buffoon in his excitement
couldn’t think of a joke to make—his ideas were all up beside the bird; the
poor, anxious, eager, excited hairdresser drew his trigger once more, and
again ’twas but a flash in the pan. Great drops of perspiration bedewed him;
he glowed, he trembled; loaded, aimed, fired, and sent his bullet several
ells, at the least, away over the bird.
He stepped back, pale and silent, in a cold perspiration; not an oath did
he utter; nay, I suspect he offered up a silent prayer or two that his co-
partner might, by heaven’s grace, capture the feathered game.
Firmian went forward, thinking as hard as he could about something else,
to keep down his thrilling excitement; aimed, not very long, at this, his
anchor in his little storms, as it hung hovering in the twilight, fired; saw the
old stump turn three times round in the air, like Fortune’s wheel, and, at
last, break loose, and come pitching down.
As, when the old French kings were crowned, a live bird always fluttered
in the air; as, at the apotheoses of the Roman emperors, an eagle soared

skyward from out the funeral pyre, so did one swoop downward from the
heavens at the coronation of my hero.
The children screamed, and the trumpets blared. One moiety of the
assemblage crowded to see who the new king was, and to have a look at
him; while the other moiety streamed crowding round the jester, as he
advanced bearing that shattered bullet-case, the eagle’s body, holding it up
above the heads of the throng. The barber ran to meet it, crying, “Vive le
roi,” and adding that he was a king himself into the bargain; and Firmian
moved towards the door in silence, full of happiness, but fuller of emotion.
And now it is time that we should all of us hurry to the town to see how
Rosa fares, what kind of throne he gains chez Madame Siebenkæs (while
her husband is thus ascending his)—a richer throne, or only a pillory—and
what number of steps he climbs towards whichever of the two it may prove
to be.
Rosa knocked at Lenette’s door, and straightway entered in at it, in order
that she might not have a chance of coming and ascertaining who was there.
“He had torn himself away from the shooting-match; her husband was
coming immediately, and he would wait for him there. His rifle had once
more been excessively fortunate.” It was with these truths that he came into
the presence of the alarmed Lenette, bearing, however upon his
countenance, an assumed aristocratic frigid zone. He walked, in an easy and
unconcerned manner, up and down the room. He inquired whether this April
weather affected her health at all; as for himself, it produced in him a kind
of miserable prostrating low fever. Lenette, timid and nervous, stood at the
window, her eyes half in the street, half in the room. He glanced, in passing,
at her work-table, took up a paper bonnet shape and a pair of scissors, and
put them down again, his attention being arrested by a paper of pins. “Why,
these are No. 8’s,” he said; “these pins are a great deal too large, Madame;
their heads would do for No. 1 shot. The lady whose hat you were putting
them in ought really to be immensely grateful to me.”
He then went quickly up to her, and, from a spot a trifling distance below
her heart (where she had a whole quiver, or thorn-hedge of needles planted,
ready for use), he plucked one out with a dauntless coolness, and held it up
for her inspection, saying, “Look how badly this is plated; ’twill spoil every
stitch you take with it.” He threw it out of the window, and evinced
symptoms of being about to pluck out the remainder from that heart (where

the fates had stuck none other than such as were “badly plated”), and stick
the contents of his own needle-book into that pretty pincushion instead. But
she waved him off with an icy, repellant, gesture, saying, “Don’t trouble
yourself.”
“I really wish your husband would come,” he said, looking at his watch.
“The king’s shot must be over long ere this time.”
He took up the paper cap-pattern again, and the scissors; but, as she fixed
on him a gaze of deep anxiety (lest he should spoil her pattern), he took
from his pocket a sheet of verses dipped in hippocrene, and, by way of
passing the time, he clipped this up, by wavy lines, into a series of hearts,
one within the other. This gentleman, who, like the Augurs, always strove to
carry off the heart of the sacrifice—he, whose own heart (like that of a
coquette) constantly grew again as often as he lost it (as a lizard’s tail does)
—he had the word “heart,” which Germans and men in general seem almost
to shrink from uttering, continually on his tongue, or, at all events,
impressions of it in his hand.
My belief that his motive for leaving behind him (as he did) his needles,
and his rhymeful hearts, was that he had observed of women that they
always think fondly of an absent person when they chance to see something
of his which he has left behind. Rosa belonged to that class of persons (of
both sexes) who never show any cleverness, delicacy of perception, or
knowledge of human nature, save in matters relating to love of the opposite
sex.
He now catechised out of her a number of cooking and washing receipts
of various kinds, and these, despite her cautious monosyllabicity, she
imparted—prescription fashion—in all their fulness, both of words and of
ingredients. At length he made preparations for departure, saying, he had
been most anxious for her husband’s homecoming because of a certain
matter of business which he could not well discuss with him on the
shooting-ground, among so many people, and before Herr von Blaise. “I
shall come another day,” he said; “but the most important point of the affair
I can mention to yourself,” and he sat down before her, with his hat and
stick in his hand. Just as he commenced his recital, however, observing that
she was standing, he laid aside his hat and stick to place a chair for her,
opposite to his. His propinquity was grateful to her Schneiderian
membrane, at any rate; his odour was paradisaic; his pocket-handkerchief a

musk-bag, his head an altar of incense, or magnified civet-ball. (Shaw has
remarked that the whole viper tribe has the property of emitting a peculiar,
sweet scent.)
“She might readily see,” he said, “that it referred to that wretched lawsuit
with the Heimlicher. The poor’s advocate did not deserve, indeed, that a
man should interest himself in his favour; but then, you see, he had an
admirable wife, who did deserve it.” (He italicised the word “admirable” by
means of a hurried squeeze of her hand.) “He had been fortunate enough to
induce Herr von Blaise to defer his ‘no’ three separate times, though he had
not as yet been able to speak to the advocate in person. But now, that a
pasquinade of Mr. Leibgeber’s (whose hand was well known), had come to
light near a stove-statue at the Heimlicher’s, nothing approximating to a
yielding, or a payment of the trust-fund, was to be dreamt of for a moment.
Now this was a state of matters for which his very heart bled, particularly
as, since he had been in such poor health of late, he felt only too keen a
sympathy and interest in everything; he knew perfectly well what an
unhappy condition her (Lenette’s) household matters had been placed in by
this lawsuit; and had often sighed, in vain, over many things. He should be
delighted, therefore, to advance whatever she might require for current
expenditure. As yet she did not know him in the slightest degree, and
perhaps could scarce surmise what he did, from motives of the purest
benevolence, for six charities in Kuhschnappel—though he could produce
documentary evidence if she liked,” and he did produce and hand to her six
receipts of the Charitable Commission. I should not be giving proof of that
impartiality of character which I bear the reputation of possessing, did I not
here freely admit, and clearly place on record, that the Venner had, from his
youth up, always shown a certain disposition to benefit and assist the poor
of both sexes, and that his consciousness that he dealt in this large-hearted
manner, did (when compared with the narrow close-fistedness prevalent in
Kuhschnappel) give him some warrant for bearing himself with a certain
amount of proper pride towards those mean and miserly beings who sate in
judgment upon his little genial breaches of the moral laws. For his
conscience bore him witness that, conversely to the process whereby
spiders are metamorphosed into jewels, he spun his shining webs (of gold
and silver), and in their meshes, wet with the glittering dew of tears, made
an occasional capture from time to time.

But for a woman like Lenette (he continued) he would do things of a
much grander description; as proofs of which, given already by him, he
needed only to point to the fact that he had set at defiance the Heimlicher’s
hostility towards her husband, and that he had more than once quietly
swallowed speeches of her husband’s own, such as in his social position he
had never suffered anybody to address to him before. “Name any sum of
money you are in want of; by Heaven, all you have to do is to ask for it.”
Lenette, bashful and trembling, glowed red with shame at this discovery
of (what she had believed to be) the mystery of her poverty and her
pawnings. With the view of pouring a few drops of oil on the troubled
waters, he began, by way of preamble, to make some disparaging remarks
concerning his fiancée at Bayreuth. “She reads too much, and doesn’t work
enough. I only wish she could have the benefit of a few lessons from you in
housekeeping. And really, a lady such as you, with so many attractions
(quite unaware of them, too, herself), so much patience, such wonderful
diligence and assiduity, should have a very different kind of household than
this place for her sphere of action.” Her hand was by this time lying still in
the stocks—the close arrest—of his; her wings and her tongue, as well as
her hands, were tied and fettered by that fainthearted incapacity of self-
assertion which is born of the sense of poverty. When women were in
question, Mr. Everard’s longings and likings paid no heed to boundary-
marks; but rather strove hard to obliterate them, and get rid of them
altogether. Most men, in the wild, unreasoning whirl of their appetites, are
like the jay, which tears the carnation to tatters in order to get at its seeds.
Upon her downcast eyes he now riveted a long gaze of fondness, not
withdrawing it, however, when she raised them up; and, by dint of keeping
his eyes very wide open, and thinking with great vividness on pathetic and
touching subjects, he managed to squeeze out about as much water as
would have sufficed to make an end of a humming bird of the smaller sort.
In him, as in a fine actor, all false emotions became for the time real and
genuine; and when he flattered any one, he at once began to respect him. As
soon as he felt there were tears enough in his eyes, and sighs enough in his
breast, he asked her if she had any idea what was causing them. She looked
innocently, and with kindly alarm, into those eyes of his, and her own began
to overflow. This greatly encouraged him, and he said, “It is the fact that
you have not such a happy lot as you deserve.”

Ah! selfish pigmy! at such a moment you might have spared this poor,
anxious, trembling soul, sinking, well nigh, in an ocean of tears for all the
long, long past.
But he knew no sorrow save of the theatrical, the transient, the petty, and
the sham sort; and so he spared her not.
Yet that which he had expected would prove the bridge from his heart to
hers, namely, sorrow, became, on the contrary, the portcullis barrier
between them. A dance, or some joyful tumult of the senses would have
brought him further with this commonplace, every-day, honest, and upright
woman than three pailfuls of selfish tears. His hopes rose high, as he laid
his flowery, sorrow-laden head upon his hands, down into her lap.
But Lenette jumped up with such a suddenness that it nearly knocked
him over altogether. She gazed inquiringly into his eyes. Upright women
must, I think, have some instinct of their own concerning the lightnings of
the eye, by means of which they can distinguish between the lurid flashes of
hell and the pure coruscations of heaven. This profligate was as little aware
of the flashes of his eyes as was Moses of the brightness of his countenance.
Her glance shrunk before his scorching gaze; at the same time I feel it
incumbent on me as an historian—seeing that readers by the thousand (and
I myself into the bargain) are all up in arms to such an extent against this
defenceless Everard—not to conceal the fact that Lenette had had her
mind’s eye firmly fixed upon certain rather rude and free-handed sketches
which Schulrath Stiefel had drawn for her of the manœuvring grounds of
rakes in general (and this one in particular), and, in consequence, had
pricked up her ears in alarm at each move he made, whether in advance or
in retreat.
And yet every word I write in defence of the poor rascal will only tell
against him now; indeed, there are many ladies whose acquaintance with
the Salic Law (or Mr. Meiner’s work) teaches them that in former times the
penalty for touching a woman’s hand was the same as for hewing off a
man’s middle finger, namely, fifteen shillings, and who, being indignant
with Rosa for his hand pressures, would fain have him to be duly punished
therefor. I am convinced that these ladies would by no means be pacified
were I to go on speaking in his extenuation, for they have doubtless learnt,
out of Mallet’s ‘Introduction to the History of Denmark,’ that formerly
persons who kissed without leave, and against the will, were, by the law of

the land, liable to be banished. And there are very many women of the
present day who are strictly governed by the ancient pandects of Germany,
and, in the case of lip-thieves (since, in the eye of the law, banishment and
confinement to one place are held to be tantamount and equivalent one to
another), they adjudge them—not, it is true, to be banished from their
chambers, but to remain in them; similarly, they lodge debtors (to whom
they have given their hearts, and who insist on retaining possession of the
same) in the Marshalsea of the Matrimonial Torus.
When Rosa jumped up (as before set forth), he had nothing to urge in
extenuation of his false step but an aggravation or augmentation of it, and
accordingly he fairly took the marble goddess in his arms—But at this point
my progress is barred for a moment by an observation which has to be
made ere I proceed; it is this: There are many kindly beauties who cover
their retreats or make amends for their denials by concessions. By way of
making themselves some amends for their hard services in the campaign of
virtue, they offer no resistance at all in matters of the smaller sort, skilfully
abandoning a good many intrenchments and outworks (in the shape of
words, articles of dress, and so on), to enable them to deftly steal a march
upon the enemy and outmanœuvre him—just as clever generals burn the
suburbs that they may fight the better up in the citadel.
My sole object in making this observation is to point out that it did not
apply to Lenette in any respect whatever. Pure as she was in soul and in
body, she might have gone straight away into heaven just as she stood,
without changing so much as a stitch of her attire—have taken her eyes,
heart, clothes, everything except that tongue of hers, which was
uncultivated, rude, indiscreet; so that her resistance to Everard’s attempted
burglary on her lips was unnecessarily grave and discourteous (considering
what a trifling case of orchard-robbery it really was), much more so than it
would have been had Lenette been able to drive the Schulrath’s highly-
coloured prognostics concerning Rosa out of her head.
Rosa had anticipated a denial of a less unpleasant kind. His obstinacy
availed him nothing as against hers, which was the greater of the two. A
gnat-swarm of firm and passionate resolves buzzed about his ears; but when
at length (probably inspired thereto by the Schulrath) she said, “Your
lordship remembers that the Tenth Commandment says, ‘Thou shalt not
covet thy neighbour’s wife’”—from the crossroad between love and hatred,

on which he was standing, he suddenly made a great jump—into his pocket
and brought out a wreath of artificial flowers, “There!” he cried, “take
them, you nasty, inexorable creature! just this one forget-me-not as a
souvenir; devil fly away with me if I want anything further!” If she had
taken it, he would immediately have wanted something further; but she
turned her face aside and repulsed the silken garland with both hands. At
this the honeycomb of love in his heart soured into very vinegar; he grew
wild with fury, and throwing the flowers right over the table, he cried,
“Why, they are your own pawned flowers—I redeemed them myself—so
take them you must.” On which he took his departure, not, however,
without making his bow, which Lenette, all hurt and offended as she was,
ceremoniously returned.
She took the envenomed wreath to the window, to have a better light to
examine it by. Alas! these were indeed, and beyond all doubt, the very roses
and rosebuds whose steely thorns were wet with the blood-drops from a
pair of pierced hearts. Whilst she, thus weeping and bowed beneath the
weight of her woe, stunned and stupid rather than observant, stood at her
window, it suddenly struck her as a strange circumstance that the torturer of
her soul, though he had gone rattling down the stairs in a hurry with noise
enough, had never gone out at the street-door. After a long and attentive
watch, during which anxiety, closely bordering upon terror, assumed the
rôle of comforter and spake louder than her sorrow (the future, at the same
time, driving the past out of view), the becrowned hairdresser came
galloping home (the crown of his hat pointing heavenwards), and shouted to
her in a mere parenthetical manner as he dashed by, “Madame the queen!”
for his great idea was, that before anything else he should rush home, and
there on the spot, and without a moment’s delay, make proclamation of the
kingship and queenship of four persons.
There now devolves upon me the duty of conducting my readers to the
corner where the Venner is cowering. From Lenette he had descended (in
two senses of that word) to the hairdresser’s wife, one of that common class
of women who never so much as dream of an infidelity all the year round—
for no horse in all the kingdom is harder worked—and commit one only
when there appears on the scene some tempter, whom they neither invite
nor resist, probably forgetting all about the incident by the time next baking
day comes round. On the whole, the superiority which the female middle-
class is disposed to arrogate to itself over that of a higher rank, is just about

equally great as it is questionable. There are not a great many tempters in
the middle-class, and those there are are not of a very tempting sort.
Like the earthworm, which has ten hearts that extend all the way from
one end of it to the other, Rosa was fitted out with as many hearts as there
are species of women; for the delicate, the coarse, the religious, the immoral
—every sort, in fact; he was always ready with the appropriate heart. For as
Lessing and others so frequently blame the critics for narrowness and
onesidedness in matters of taste, inculcating upon them a greater
universality of it—a greater power of appreciation of the beautiful, to
whatsoever times and nations belonging—so do men of the world also
advocate a universality of taste for the live beautiful, on two legs, not
excluding any variety of it, but deriving gratification from all. This taste the
Venner possessed. There was such a marked distinction between his
feelings for the wigmaker’s wife and for Lenette, that, in revenge upon the
latter, he came to the determination, on the stair, to take a jump right over
this distinction and slip in to pay a visit to the landlady, while her narrow-
chested husband was away scheming and plotting in confederacy for a
crown in another quarter. Sophia (this was her name) had been always
combing at wigs in the bookbinder’s on the occasions when the Venner had
been sitting there on the business of getting his novels and life romances
done up and bound, and there they had communicated to one other, by
looks and glances, all that which people are not in the habit of confiding to
third parties. Meyern made his entrée into the childless abode with all the
confident assurance of an epic poet, who soars superior to all prefaces.
There was a certain corner partitioned off from the room by boards: it
contained little or nothing—no window, no chair, a little warmth from the
sitting-room, a clothes-cupboard, and the couple’s bed.
When the first compliments had been exchanged, Rosa took up a position
behind the door of this partitioned space, for the street passed close by the
window, and at this late hour he was anxious not to give occasion to
unpleasant surmises on the part of passers by. Of a sudden, however, Sophia
saw her husband run by the window. The intent to commit a sin may betray
itself by a superabundance of carefulness and caution; Rosa and Sophia
were so startled at the sight of the runner, that she begged the young
gentleman to get behind the partition until her husband should go back to
the shooting-range. The Venner went stumbling into the sanctum
sanctorum, while Sophia placed herself at the door of it, and, as her

husband entered, made as though she were just coming out of it, closing the
door after her. The moment he had stuttered out the news of his elevation in
rank, he darted out of the room, crying, “She upstairs there knows nothing
about it yet.” Gladness and hurried draughts of liquor had just blurred the
sharp outlines of his lighter ideas with a thin haze or fog. He ran out and
called “Madame Siebenkæs” up the stairs (he was anxious to be off again so
as to join the procession). She hastened half way down, heard the glad news
with trembling, and, either by way of masking her joy, or as a fruit of a
warmer liking for her husband now that fortune seemed kinder to him (or it
may have been, perhaps, another fruit which joy commonly bears, namely,
anxiety, or shall I name it fear?), she threw down to him the question, “Is
Mr. von Meyern out yet?”
“What! was he in my room just now?” cried he, while his wife echoed,
unbidden, from the door, “Has he been in the house?” “He was here,
upstairs,” Lenette replied, with a touch of suspicion, “and he hasn’t gone
out yet.”
The hairdresser’s suspicions were now awakened, for the consumptive
trust no woman, and, like children, take every chimney-sweep they see for
the devil himself, hoof, horns, tail and all. “Things are not all exactly as
they should be here, Sophy,” said he to his wife. The passing brain-dropsy,
induced by what he had drunk during the day and by his half-share in a
throne and fifty florins, had the effect of screwing his courage up to such a
pitch that he secretly formed the idea of treating the Venner to a good sound
cudgelling in the event of his coming upon him in any illegal corner.
Accordingly he started upon voyages of discovery, first exploring the
entrance passage, where Rosa’s sweet-scented head served him as a trail, or
lure; he followed this incense-pillar of cloud into his own room, observing
that this Ariadne’s thread of his, this sweet odour, grew stronger as he went.
Here among the flowers lay the serpent—as, according to Pliny, sweet-
smelling forests harbour venomous snakes. Sophia wished herself in the
nethermost of Dante’s hells, though in fact and reality she was there
already. It dawned upon the hairdresser that if the Venner would only stay
where he was, in the closed titmouse-trap of the partitioned corner, he
should have bruin safe in his toils; consequently he reserved till the last a
peep into the said corner. What is historically certain is, that he seized upon
a pair of curling-tongs wherewith to probe the dark corner and gauge the
cubic contents thereof. Into its dark depths he made a horizontal lunge with

his tongs, but encountered nothing. He next inserted this probe, this
searcher of his, into more places than one—firstly, into the bed, next, under
the bed (taking this time the precaution to keep opening and shutting the
tongs, which were not hot, on the chance of some stray lock of hair getting
caught in them in the darkness.) However, all this trap captured was air. At
this juncture he came upon a clothes-cupboard, the door of which had
always stood gaping ajar for the last six years or so; the key had been lost
just that time, and in this slipshod household it was a matter of necessity to
keep this door open, otherwise the lock would have snapped to, and there
would have been no getting in. To-day, however, this door was close shut.
The Venner (in a profuse perspiration) was inside; the friseur pressed the
lock home, and then the net was fairly over the quail.
The hairdresser, now master of the situation, quietly took the command
of his establishment at his ease; the Venner could not get out!
He despatched Sophia (as red as a furnace and loudly dissentient, though
forced to obey) for the locksmith and his breaching implements; however,
she quite made up her mind to come back with a lie, not with a locksmith.
When she had marched off he fetched Fecht, the cobbler, up, to be at once
his witness of and his assistant in that which he proposed to accomplish.
The shoe-stitcher crept into the room softly at his heels; the phthisic
haircurler went up to the canary-cage and addressed the bird imprisoned
therein (tapping the while with his tongs on the gate of this fortress of
Engelsburg) as follows: “I know you are in there, honourable Sir, make a
move; there’s nobody here but me, as yet (there’ll soon be more). I can
break the cupboard open with my tongs and let you out.” Laying his ear
close to the door of this Spandau, he heard the captive sigh.
“Ah! you are puffing and panting a little, honourable gentleman,” said
the wigmaker; “I am here at the door by myself now. When the locksmith
comes and breaks it open, we shall all see you, and I’ll call the whole
house; but all I shall ask to let you jump out now, quietly, and be off unseen,
will be a mere trifle. Give me that hat of yours, and a shilling or two, and
give me your custom.”
At length the miserable prisoner knocked upon the door and said, “I am
in here; just let me out, will you, my man, and I’ll do all you say. I can help,
from the inside, to break open the door.” The wigmaker and the cobbler
applied their battering apparatus to the “parloir” of this donjon-keep, and