The Invisible Lodge. Jean Paul
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to sell the superfluous equipments at auction in Cassel--but because they will not now let me sleep, which is surely the first non-natural thing."
Eating they absolutely denied me, because that is the second unnatural thing of a reigning lord. Did not the Restaurateur of Flörzhübel, who had set on the fire for me the whole boiled and roasted widow's half of my country, summon me on the very carriage-step to take a bite, and when--for we grandees do not like to excite the populace to a hungry astonishment by despising envied fare--I begged with my own mouth only for a beer-soup, did not the Restaurateur make a sour face and say: "He had none in the whole hotel; and if he had, future hosts should never have it to say of him, that among so many jus and bouillons, he had presented to his most gracious master nothing but a bowl of beer-soup."
The third thing, combining both motion and rest, I came within a hair of losing through the triumphal arch of my place of burial, because it and the musical gallery upon it tumbled down close at the heels of my last servant, but to the joy of the country, harmed nothing belonging to any man, except the barber's cupping-glasses, which he had attached to the triumphal gate, projecting in such a manner as to have something hung upon them wherein was to be stuck the not bad illumination. I was going to be properly mad about the satirical cupping-vessels, which I was fain to take for satirical types and emblems of my Countly cupping of the full veins of my tenants and vassals, and I asked the Mayor whether he thought I was utterly devoid of wit; but they all in a body swore that in the whole getting up of the triumphal arch wit had not been once thought of.
Air, the fourth non-natural thing of an Imperial Hereditary Casperl, I might by this time have had; for not merely on account of the short misuse which the instruments and lungs of my vassals made of so glorious an element, should I have shut myself up and the sector of air around me so closely as I in fact did, into my carriage--that I must say expressly, so that the good Kelzheim Chorister may not imagine I was displeased because his musical fire-arm, his trumpet, from the double sound-hole of his belfry and his body, stuck out towards me to such an extent that the melodious air-waves from the two came to meet me four acres off, while below in the steeple his wife also milked the bells, as if I were being buried and receiving not so much a reception as a requiem--I say, not on account of the musical married pair would I have shut the carriage, but it was on account of the danger of life; for a joyous picket of peasants discharged at me out of seventeen fowling-pieces and two or three pocket-pistols, not only salvos, but a few ramrods into the bargain.
Now, when a Count sits there deprived of four nonnatural things, he may not venture to think of the fifth, of evacuation. The sphincter of every, even the greatest, pore remains closed, as well as the coach-door; no wonder then, that, as I could not say to a single pore--Ephphatha: be opened!--I started up crying "Deil a bit do I gain by my sitting on the bench of Counts at Ratisbon, if here I must squat on the coach-cushion and not be able to do anything, even."
Genuine Passion, which is the sixth non-natural thing of man, is stifled by nothing so easily as by a satin dog's-pillow, on which the parsons, schoolmasters and magistrates, whom an Imperial Hereditary Casperl has under him, deliver to him the Carmina which they have caused to be composed in his honor; for they can neither be laughed at nor wept over, nor scolded at nor spoken of.
My tenants and vassals, after filching from me so much of my six non-natural things, gave me back in the very act half of the first, namely, wakefulness; but they had worked themselves into such a sweat on my account, that I was thrown into one on theirs. When I woke up, I thought at first I had been dreaming; but upon becoming more wide awake I observed that, with the exception of names, it was the stolen history of my own neighborhood. To be sure it vexes me just as much as if the illuminations and the musical uproar had been arranged expressly on my account, that the subjects make both merely with the malicious intention of driving their great or little Regent from disgust and torture to betake himself to his tour again; which they have evidently learned from the Oriental caravans, which, in like manner, by drumming and lighting fires keep off wild beasts from their bodies.
THIRD SECTION.
Underground Education.--The Best of Moravians and the Best of Poodles
Here my story properly begins; the scene lies in Auenthal, or rather at the mountain-castle of the Falkenbergs, which stood some acres distant from it. The first child of the Chess-Amazon and the Dying Gladiator and Captain in Check was Gustavus--not the illustrious Swedish hero, but mine. My greeting to thee, little darling! here on the scene of this rag-paper and this ragged life! I know thy whole life beforehand, therefore it is that the wailing voice of thy first minute moves me so sorely: I see on so many a year of thy life tear-drops hanging, that is why I am so touched with compassion, as I look at thy eye, which is as yet tearless because it is merely thy body that pains thee;--man comes without a smile, without a smile he goes, for a space of three fleeting minutes he was happy. I have therefore with wise forethought, dear Gustavus, saved up the fresh May of thy youth, of which I am to print a landscape-piece upon poor blotting-paper, against the May of the natural year, in order now, when every day is a creation day of nature, to make each day of mine such; in order that now, when every breath one draws is a steel-cure, every step four inches longer and the eye less curtained by the overhanging eyelid, I may write with a flying hand and with an elastic bosom full of breath and blood.
Fortunately, from the 2d to the 27th of May, (and that is all my description covers) we have a steady spell of fine weather; for I am something of a meteorological clairvoyant and my short leg and my long face are the best weather cards and hygrometers in this part of the country.
Since education has far less effect upon the inner man (and far more on the outer) than tutors imagine, one will be surprised that with Gustavus exactly the opposite occurred; for his whole life echoed the choral tone of his superterrestrial, i. e., subterranean training. For the reader must still remember being told in the 1st Section, that the Moravianly disposed wife of the Head-forester von Knör refused to let her daughter Ernestina play herself away at chess except on consideration that the winning bridegroom should promise in the marriage contract to educate and conceal their first child for eight years under the earth, in order to save him from being hardened at once to the beauties of Nature and the distortions of humanity. In vain did the Captain protest to Ernestina, that "in this way his mother-in-law would reduce the soldier to a mere lady's night-cap, and they should rather wait until a girl came." He, too, like many other men vented his vexation with the mother-in-law wholly upon his wife. But the old lady had already, before the baptism, bespoken a young man of heavenly beauty from Barby. The Captain, like all energetic people, could not endure the Moravian Diminuendo; he talked most about their talking so little; it even annoyed him that the Moravian inn-keepers did not overreach him far enough.
But our Genius--this fine name he shall keep for the present on every page--did not succumb and sicken under those heart-cramping spasms of Moravianism; he took from it only its softness and simplicity. Above his dreamy, enthusiastic eye rose a smooth, peaceful, guiltless forehead, which the fortieth year left as unruled[10] and unmarked as the fourteenth. He bore a heart which vices, as poisons do precious stones, would have crumbled to pieces; even another's face ploughed or sowed with sins oppressed and stifled his breast, and his inner man turned pale in the presence of filthy souls, as the sapphire on the finger of an unchaste man is said to lose its azure glow.
Still a sacrifice of so many years' duration for a child must have weighed hard and heavily even upon so fair a soul as the Moravian's; but he said: "O what heavenly opportunities it also afforded him, which, however, he promised only in the future to his Gustavus, who, surely, with God's help, would bloom up as he hoped, and no one ought certainly to wonder at his seeming self-sacrifice to a true and profound earthly life." And I hope, in fact, my more refined readers,