Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days

A BIOGRAPHY

FROM THE GERMAN OF

JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER

TRANSLATED BY

CHARLES T. BROOKS

"The Earth is the cul-de-sac in the great city of God,—the camera obscura full of inverted and contracted images from a fairer world,—the coast of God's creation,—a vaporous halo around a better sun,—the numerator to a still invisible denominator,—in fact, it is almost nothing at all."

Selections from the Papers of the Devil.

IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. II.

BOSTON: TICKNOR AND FIELDS. 1865.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by TICKNOR AND FIELDS, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

University Press: Welch, Bigelow, And Company, Cambridge.

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

25. DOG-POST-DAY.

Feigned and Real Swoons of Clotilda.—Julius.—Emanuel's Letter Concerning God.

26. DOG-POST-DAY.

Tergemini.—Zeusel and his Twin-Brother.—The Ascending Peruke.— Detection Of Knaveries.

27. DOG-POST-DAY.

Eye-Bandaging.—Picture behind the Bed-curtain.—Two Virtues in Danger.

28. DOG-POST-DAY.

First Easter-Holiday.—Arrival at the Parsonage.—Club of the Three Twins.—Carps.

Second Easter-Holiday.—Funeral-Discourse on Himself.—Two Opposite Sorts of Fatality to the Wax-Statue.

Third Easter-Holiday.—F. Koch's Double Jews-harp.—The Sleigh-Ride.—The Ball And....

Preface to Part III.

Seventh Intercalary Day.—End of the Register of Extra-Shoots.— Unfeelingness of Readers.—Vol. III. (Preface to).

29. DOG-POST-DAY.

Conversion.—Billet-Doux of the Watch.—Crape Hat.

30. DOG-POST-DAY.

Letters.

31. DOG-POST-DAY.

Clotilda's Letter.—The Night-Express.—Rents and Gashes in the Band of Friendship.

32. DOG-POST-DAY.

Physiognomies of Victor and Flamin.—Boiling-Point of Friendship.— Splendid Hopes for us.

33. DOG-POST-DAY.

First Whitsuntide-Day.—Police-Regulations of Pleasure.—Church.— The Evening.—The Blooming-Cavern.

34. DOG-POST-DAY.

Second Day of Whitsuntide.—Morning.—The Abbess.—The Water-Mirror.—Dumb Action for Libel.—The Rain and the Open Heaven.

35. DOG-POST-DAY.

Third Day of Whitsuntide, or Burgundy Chapter.—The Englishman.— Meadow-Ball.—Blissful Night.—The Blooming Cave.

36. DOG-POST-DAY.

Fourth and Last Day of Whitsuntide.—Hyacinth.—The Voice of Emanuel's Father.—Letter from the Angel.—Flute on the Grave.— Second Nightingale,—Farewell.—Pistols.—Ghostly Apparition.

Fourth Preface, or, Extorted Anticritique against one or another Review, with which I might possibly be displeased.

Ninth Intercalary Day.—Victor's Essay on the Relation of the Soul to the Organs.

37. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Amoroso at Court.—Preliminary Recesses of Marriage.—Defence of Courtly Back-bending.

38. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Sublime Hour before Midnight.—The Blissful After-Midnight.—The Soft Evening.

39. DOG-POST-DAY.

Great Disclosure.—New Separations.

40. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Murderous Duel.—Apology for the Duel.—Prisons regarded as Temples.—Job's-Wails of the Parson.—Legends of my Biographical Past.—Potato-Planting.

41. DOG-POST-DAY.

Letter.—Two new Incisions of Fate.—His Lordship's Confession of Faith.

42. DOG-POST-DAY.

Self-Sacrifice.—Farewell Addresses to the Earth.—Memento Mori.— Walk.—Heart of Wax.

43. DOG-POST-DAY.

Matthieu's Four Whitsuntide Days and Jubilee.

44. DOG-POST-DAY.

Brotherly Love.—Friendly Love.—Maternal Love.—Love.

45. OR LAST CHAPTER.

Knef.—The Town of Hof.—Sorrel House.—Robbers.—Sleep.—Oath.— Night Journey.—Bushes.—End.

APPENDIX.

Additional Notes to "Titan".

HESPERUS,

OR

25. DOG-POST-DAY.

Feigned and Real Swoons of Clotilda.—Julius.—Emanuel's Letter concerning God.

Good, beautiful sex! Sometimes, when I see a diamond heart hanging above thy warm one, I ask: Is it for some such reason as this thou wearest a copied heart on thy bosom, in order to indicate to Love, Fate, and Slander a common mark for their different arrows, as the poor soldier who is shot kneeling points out to the balls of his comrades, by a heart cut out of paper, the place of the beating one?

—When this chapter is ended, the reader will no longer ask me, why I begin it thus....

Once Victor came back from a day's walk, when Marie ran breathless to meet him with a letter from Matthieu. It contained the question whether he would not accompany him and his sister to-day to Kussewitz via St. Luna. Marie's running had arisen merely from a rich messenger's-fee and gratuity on the part of Mat, who often treated poor people at once with generosity and with persiflage, just as he thought his sister at once amiable and absurd. To people who knew him, he therefore appeared comic when he must have been serious. But Victor said "No" to the request for his company; which was very well, for in fact the two had already started. I cannot determine whether it was after two or after three days that they came back, the sister with the coldest face towards him and the brother with the warmest. This double temperature could not be wholly explained, but only about half, on the ground of discoveries which the couple might have made at Tostato's and Count O.'s concerning his disguise and his shop-drama. Heretofore Joachime's anger had always

been a consequence of his: now it was the reverse; but this vexed him exceedingly.

Some days after he was standing with the Princess and Joachime in a window of the Ministerial Louvre. The conversation was lively enough; the Princess counted over the shops in the market, Joachime was following with her eye the swift zigzag of a swallow, Victor was standing secretly on one leg (the other he set, only apparently and without resting on it, on the floor), to try how long he could hold out. All at once the Princess said, "Holy Mary! how can one carry round a poor child shut up so in a box!" They all peered out into the street. Victor took the liberty to remark that the poor child was "made of wax." A woman was carrying a little glass case hanging before her, wherein there slept a swaddled waxen angel; she begged, like the rest, as if for this child, and the little one supported her better than if it had been alive. The Princess called up the new apparition. The woman came in trembling with her mummy-chest, and drew back the little curtain. The Princess bent an artistically enchanted eye on the sweet slumbering form, which (like its wax material) seemed to have been born

of flowers and reared in springtimes. All beauty penetrated deeply into her heart; hence she loved Clotilda so exceedingly and many Germans so little. Joachime was fond of only one child and one beauty,—and each was herself. Victor said, "This waxen mimic and copy of life had always made him sad, and that he could not even see his own wax counterfeit in St. Luna without shuddering."

"Doesn't it stand in a frock-coat at the window of the parsonage?" asked Joachime, becoming much more pleasant.

"Isn't it true," he asked in return, "that you thought, some days ago, it was I myself?" He guessed from her look her former error, which perhaps had contributed to excite her against him.

The father confessor of the Princess now came up and added,—after his custom of being complimentary,—that, in order to save him the trouble of a sitting, he would draw him the next time merely from his wax image. The Pater was well known to be a good draughtsman.

I let circumstances which are less important lie unrelated, and gayly proceed.

It was as early as March, when the higher classes, on account of their sedentary winter sleep, are more full-blooded than cold-blooded,—any one who does not understand the matter takes for granted that their overflow of blood proceeds more from their sucking that of others,—when sicknesses leave their visiting-cards in the form of recipes with the whole court,—when the eyes of the Princess, the embonpoint of the princely ether, and the gouty hands of the court apothecary continued the storms of winter; it was even then; I say, that Clotilda also experienced every day more intensely the influence of the winter, and of her double withdrawal from relaxations and of her intercourse with her fancies.... If I must speak sincerely, I attribute little to her seclusion, but all to the necessity which propriety imposes on her of intercourse with the noble Mat, with the Schleuneses and with other cold-blooded Amphibia;[1] an innocent heart must, in moral frosty weather, like alabaster garden statues in the physical, when the former and the latter have soft, absorbing veins, get cracks,

and break.

Thus matters stood with her on a weighty day, when he found with her little Julia. This beloved name she affixed to the child of the Senior, Flamin's landlord, in order to keep alive her sad yearning after her dead Giulia by a similarity of sound, by the relic of an echo. "This funereal tone," said Victor to himself, "is indeed to her the welcome distant roll of the hearse which shall come to take her to the friend of her youth; and her expectation of a like fate is truly the most mournful evidence of a like grief." If anything further was needed to purify his friendship from all love, it was this swift falling-off of the leaves of so fair a passion-flower;—towards the suffering, one is ashamed of the least selfishness. During the conversation, from which the jealous Julia was excluded by not understanding it, the child in a pet twitched at the servants' bell; for girls make claims to attention eight years earlier than boys. Clotilda forbade this ringing by a too late interdict; the little one, delighted that she had set in motion

the chambermaid, who came hastening up, tried again to twitch at the cord. Clotilda said in French to the Doctor, "One must not give her any command too monarchically; now she will not rest till I have tried my extremest method." "Julia!" said she once more, her large eye overflowing with love; but in vain. "Well, now I am going to die!" said she, already dying away, and leaned her fair head, inhabited by a departing genius, back against the chair, and closed her pure eyes, which deserved to open again only in a heaven.—While Victor stood in silent emotion before the still tranced one, and thought to himself: "If now she should never wake again, and thou shouldst vainly snatch her stiff hand, and her last word on this dreary earth should have been, 'Now I am going to die,'—O God! would there be any other remedy for the inconsolableness of her friend than a sword and the last wound? And I should clasp with a cold hand her hand, and say, I go with thee!" As he thought thus, and as the little one, weeping, lifted the sinking

right hand, her countenance really grew paler, and the left hand glided down from her lap;—here was that sword's sharp edge drawn across his heart;—but soon she opened her wandering eyes again, coming out of the drowsiness of the death-sleep to herself and to a sense of shame. She excused the transient swoon with the remark, "I have done as that player[2] did with the urn of his child: I imagined myself in the place of my Giulia in her last moments, but a little too successfully."

He was just on the point of drawing up medical pastoral letters against this consuming enthusiasm,—so much does an unhappy love translate every female heart from the major tone into the minor, even that of a Clotilda, whose forehead had a manly elevation, and whose chin expressed almost more courage than beauty,—when quite other pastoral letters arrived. The bearer of them was Victor's happier friend Agatha. Send back with thy laugh, thou untroubled one, life into two hearts on which death has flung his flying cloud-shadows! She fell confidingly into two friendly arms; but towards her doctor brother, who so long, instead of his whole person, had let only his hand, i. e. his handwriting, go to St. Luna, she was still shy. But this fault of his, when he had avoided a house one quarter of a year for reasons, of absenting himself from it another quarter of a year without reason,—this fault I cannot wholly condemn, because I—have it myself. She could not satisfy her eyes with looking at him; her blooming country face showed him, instead of his present passion-week of grief,

a red chalk drawing of his and her vanished days of joy in the parsonage-garden. He solemnly promised her to be her Easter guest with her brother, and, instead of heads and windows, to break nothing but eggs; he rested not till he was the same old Sebastian and she the same old Agatha again. As she delivered to the two court-people, smiling only from love, the long duodecimo history of the village and her father, not at all as a compiler or epitomist, or in a mutilated edition, but in volumes as long as her heel-ligaments; then did Clotilda and Victor feel how soothing to them was this descent from the glittering, sharp court-glaciers into the soft vales of the middling stations of life, and they both yearned to exchange polished hearts for warm ones. Among men and Borsdorf apples the best are not the smooth ones, but the rough ones that have some warts. This longing for sincere souls, too, it may well have been which wrung from Clotilda the assertion, that there were mismatches only between souls, not between ranks. Hence came her growing love for this Agatha, who bloomed

outside of the forcing-box of a genealogical tree only in the common pasture,—a love which the reader and I in the first volume, from sharp-sightedness, explained as the hiding-cloak of another love toward Flamin, and which ought to wean us both from bringing a reproach upon a heroine, who in the sequel continually refutes it.

The superscription of the thick letter-packet which Agatha brought was in the handwriting of Emanuel, whom Clotilda got to superscribe everything to the parson's wife, in order to save her stepmother the trouble of—closing her letters. Madame Le Baut had learned this insight into documents, this Socratic art of midwifery, in the ministry, which possesses the right of search into the letters of all subjects, because it can hold them either as infected or arrested, if it please. While the step-daughter, in the adjoining chamber, broke open the outer packet, because from its thickness she prophesied an enclosed communication for the Doctor: the latter breathed, by chance—or design, for he had, this long time, established everywhere his deciphering offices of women, in the narrowest corner, in every fold of a dress, in the marks of books which had been read,—he breathed, I said, accidentally on the window-panes, on which one can then at once read what a warm finger has written thereon. There came out, after the involuntary breathing, nothing but French initial S's,

sketched with the finger-nail. "S!" thought he, "that is singular; that is the beginning of my own name."

His conjectures were interrupted by Clotilda's returning with a face blissfully cleared of all its clouds, and, handing to the thoughtful Medicus a great letter from Emanuel. Upon the heels of this second pleasure followed, in the place of the third, a piece of news; she now disclosed to him, "that Emanuel had at last enabled her to be an obedient, though not believing patient." She had, namely, hitherto suppressed the purpose of her obedience and her spring cure, until her friend in Maienthal had secured her for some spring months a sick-chamber at the Abbess's,—the very one Giulia had had,—that the fanning of spring might there lift her drooping pinions, the incense of flowers heal her torn heart, and the great friend enable his great friend to stand upright.

Victor slipped away hastily, not only from hunger and thirst after what he held in his hand, but because a new flood of thought broke through his old trains of ideas. "Bastian!" said Bastian to himself on the way, "I have often held thee to be stupid, but so stupid as that—no, never. It is sinful that a man, a court-medicus, a thinker, should ruminate for months, often half-evenings together, and yet not bring the matter out, till he hears it, now for the first time. Verily, even the 'S' on the window fits!" The reader and I will take out of his hands the thing with which he is stoning himself before our faces; for he throws at both of us as well, because we failed to guess at anything just as much as he did. In short, the unknown happy one who makes the fair Clotilda unhappy, and for whom she sighs out her dumb, shy soul, and who for most of her charms has no eye at all, is the blind—Julius in Maienthal. Hence her desire to go thither.

I should like to fill a folio volume with the proofs of this: Victor counted them off on his five fingers. On his thumb he said, "For Julius's sake she seeks little Julia; so, too, is it with Giulia." At the forefinger he said, "The French initial I looks like an S without the cross-stroke." At the middle finger, "Minerva has furnished him, indeed, not merely the flute, but also Minerva's fair face, and in this blind Cupid's-face Clotilda could lose herself without blushing; even from love for his friend Emanuel, she might have loved him." At the ring-finger, "Hence her justification of mis-matches, since his citizenly ring-finger is to be joined to her noble one." At the little finger, "By Heaven! all this proves not the least."

For now, for the first time, all the proofs came upon him in a flood: in the first volume of this book there came often an unknown angel to Julius and said: "Be good, I will hover round thee, I will guard thy veiled soul,—I go back into heaven."—

Secondly, this angel once gave Julius a paper, and said, "Conceal it, and after a year, when the birches grow green in the temple, let Clotilda read it to thee; I take my flight, and thou wilt not hear me sooner than a year hence."—

All this fitted Clotilda as if it were moulded on her: she could never unfold to the blind one her dying heart,—she was going just now to Maienthal (how long is it still to Whitsuntide?) to read to him herself the leaf which she had handed to him in the character and mask of an angel,—finally, she was going off precisely then to St. Luna;—in short, everything hits to a hair.

If the Biographer might venture to put in a word, it would be this: The Mining-Superintendent, the Biographer, for his part, believes it all with great pleasure; but as to Clotilda, who hitherto has come forth whitely radiant from every pitchy cloud, and on whom, as on the sun, one has so often confounded clouds with sun-spots, he cannot blame her, until she herself sets the example. Victor, as I myself did in the first edition, has even forgotten many proofs of Clotilda's love for Julius: e. g. her warm interest in his blindness, and her desire of his recovery (in her letter to Emanuel), Flamin's obsolete jealousy in Maienthal, even the rapture with which, in the playhouse, she calls the vale an Eden, and rejects the Lethe.

Victor tore open the packet, and two leaves fell out of a large sheet. One of the notes and the large sheet were from Emanuel, the other from his Lordship. He studied the last, written in double cipher, first; it was as follows:—

"I come in autumn, when the apples ripen,—the Trinity [his Lordship means the Prince's three sons] is found; but the fourth Person [the fourth, merry son] is wanting.—Flee from the Palace of the Empress of all the Russias [with this cipher the two had concerted to designate the Minister Schleunes], but the grand duchess [Joachime] avoid still more: she wants no heart, but a princely hat.—In Rome [he means Agnola] beware of the crucifix, out of which a stiletto springs! Think of the Island, ere thou makest a misstep."