Titan: A Romance Volume I Part 20

Roquairol came back with strangely excited eyes; he had stormed wildly into his heart; he had been wicked, for the sake of despairing, and then, on his knees, at the bottom of the precipice, confessing to his friend the nature of his life. This man, so wilful, lay involuntarily bound to the windmill wings of his fancy, and was now fettered by a calm, now whirled round by the storm, which he imagined himself cutting through. He was now, after the a.n.a.logy of the fire-eaters, a fire-drinker, in the uneasy expectation of Schoppe's departure. The latter departed at last, despite Albano's entreaty, with the answer: "_Redeem the time_, says the Apostle; but that means, Prolong your life all you can: _that_ is time. To this end the best shops of the times, the apothecaries', require that a man, after _punch royal_, shall go to bed and sweat immoderately."

Now how changed was all! When Zesara joyfully fell on his neck,--when the delirium of youth grew to the melodies of love, as the rain in Derbys.h.i.+re-hollow at a distance becomes harmonies,--when from the Count's lips flowed sweetly, as one bleeds in his sleep, his whole inner being, his whole past life, and all his plans of the future, even the proudest (only not the tenderest one),--and when, like Adam in the state of innocence (according to Madame Bourignon), he placed himself in such crystal transparency before his friend's eye, not from weakness, but from old instinct, and in the faith that such his friend must be,--then did tears of the most loving admiration come into the eyes of the unhappy Roquairol at the unvarnished purity, and at the energetic, credulous, unsophisticated nature, and at the almost smile-provoking _nave_ and lofty earnestness of the red-cheeked youth. He sobbed upon that joy-drunken bosom, and Albano grew tender, because he thought he was too little so, and his friend so very much in that mood.

"Come out o' doors,--out o' doors!" said Charles; and that had long been Albano's wish. It struck one, as they saw, on the narrow cellar-stairs, the stars of the spring heaven overhead glistening down through the entrance of the shaft. How freshly flowed the inhaled night over the hot lips! How firmly stood the world-rotunda, built with its fixed rows of stars high and far away over the flying tent-streets of the city! How was the fiery eye of Albano refreshed and expanded by the giant ma.s.ses of the glimmering spring, and the sight of day slumbering under the transparent mantle of night! Zephyrs, the b.u.t.terflies of day, fluttered already about their dear flowers, and sucked from the blossoms, and brought in incense for the morning; a sleep-drunken lark soared occasionally into the still heavens with a loud day in her throat; over the dark meadows and bushes the dew had already been sprinkled, whose jewel-sea was to burn before the sun; and in the north floated the purple pennons of Aurora, as she sailed toward morning. With an exalting power the thought seized the youth, that this very minute was measuring millions of little and long lives, and the walk of the sap-caterpillar and the flight of the sun, and that this very same time was being lived through by the worm and G.o.d, from worlds to worlds, through the universe. "O G.o.d!" he exclaimed, "how glorious it is to exist!"

Charles merely clung, with the drooping, heavy feathers of the night-bird, to the cheerful constellations around him. "Happy for thee,"

said he, "that thou canst be thus, and that the sphinx in thy bosom still sleeps. Thou knowest not what I am about to do. I knew a wretch who could portray her right well. In the cavern of man's breast, said he, lies a monster on its four claws, with upturned Madonna's face, and looks round smiling, for a time, and so does man too. Suddenly it springs up, buries its claws into the breast, rends it with lion's-tail and hard wings, and roots and rushes and roars, and everywhere blood runs down the torn cavern of the breast. All at once it stretches itself out again, b.l.o.o.d.y, and smiles away again with the fair Madonna's face.

O, he looked all bloodless, the wretch! because the beast so fed upon him and thirstily lapped at his heart."

"Horrible!" said Albano; "and yet I do not quite understand thee." The moon at this moment lifted herself up, together with a flock of clouds that lay darkly camped along her sides, and she drew a storm-wind after her, which drove them among the stars. Charles went on more wildly: "In the beginning, the wretch found it as yet good: he had as yet sound pains and pleasures, real sins and virtues; but as the monster smiled and tore faster and faster, and he continued to alternate more and more rapidly between pleasure and pain, good and evil; and when blasphemies and obscene images crept into his prayers, and he could neither convert nor harden himself; then did he lie there, in a dreary exhaustion of bleeding, in the tepid, gray, dry mist-banks of life, and thus was dying all the time he lived.--Why weepest thou? Knowest thou that wretch?"

"No," said Albano, mildly. "I am he!" "Thou? Terrible G.o.d, not thou!"

"O, it is I; and though thou despisest me, thou wilt be what I ... No, my innocent one, I say it not. See, even now the sphinx rises again. O pray with me, help me, that I may not be obliged to sin,--only not be obliged! I must drink, I must debauch, I must be a hypocrite,--I am a hypocrite at this moment." Zesara saw the rigid eye, the pale, shattered face, and, in a rage of love, shook him with both arms, and stammered, with deep emotion, "By the Almighty! this is not true! thou art indeed so tender and pale and unhappy and innocent."

"Rosy-cheek," said Charles, "I seem to thee pure and bright as yonder orb; but she too, like me, casts a long shadow up toward heaven." Zesara let go of him, took a long look toward the sublime, dark Tartarus, encompa.s.sing Elysium like a funeral train, and pressed away bitter tears, which flowed at the remembrance how he had found therein his first friend, who was now melting away at his side. Just then the night-wind tore up a fir-tree which had been killed by the wood-caterpillar, and Albano pointed silently to the cras.h.i.+ng tree.

Charles shrieked: "Yes, that is I!" "Ah, Charles, have I then lost thee to-day?" said the guiltless friend, with infinite pain; and the fair stars of spring fell like hissing sparks into his wounds.

This word dissolved Charles's overstrained heart into good, true tears; a holy spirit came over him, and bade him not torment the pure soul with his own, not take away its faith, but silently sacrifice to it his wild self, and every selfish thought. Softly he laid himself on his friend's bosom, and with magical, low words, and full of humility, and without fiery images, told him his whole heart; and that it was not wicked, but only unhappy and weak, and that he ought to have been as heartily sincere towards him, who thought too well of him, as towards G.o.d; and that he swore, by the hour of death, to be such as he,--to confess to him everything, always,--to become holy through him. "Ah, I have only been loved so very little!" he concluded. And Albano, the love-intoxicated, glowing man, the good man, who knew by his own experience the sacred excesses and exaggerations of remorse, and took these confessions to be such, came back, inspired, to the old covenant with unmeasured love. "Thou art an ardent man!" said Charles; "why do men, then, always lie frozen together on each other's b.r.e.a.s.t.s, as on Mount Bernard,[133] with rigid eye, with stiffened arms? O why camest thou to me so late? I had been another creature. Why came she[134] so early? In the village down below there, at the narrow, lowly church-door,--there I first saw her through whom my life became a mummy. Verily, I am speaking now with composure. They carried along before me, as I went out to walk, a corpse-like white youth on a bier into Tartarus: it was only a statue, but it was the emblem of my future.

An evil genius said to me, 'Love the fair one whom I show thee.' She stood at the church-door, surrounded by people of the congregation, who wondered at the boldness with which she took up, in her two hands, a silver-gray, tongue-darting snake, and dandled it. Like a daring G.o.ddess, she bent her firm, smooth brow, her dark eye, and the rose-blossoms of her countenance upon the adder's head, which Nature had trodden flat, and played with it close to her breast. 'Cleopatra!' said I, although a boy. She, too, even then, understood it, looked up calmly and coldly from the snake, and gave it back, and turned round. O, on my young breast she flung the chilling, life-gnawing viper. But, truly, it is now all gone by, and I speak calmly. Only in the hours, Albano, when my b.l.o.o.d.y clothes of that night, which my sister has laid up, come before my eyes, then I suffer once more, and ask, 'Poor, well-meaning boy! wherefore didst thou then grow older?' But, as I said, it is all over now. To thee, only to thee, may a better genius say, 'Love the fair one whom I show thee!'"

But what a world of thoughts now flew at once into Albano's mind! "He continues to torment himself," thought he, "with the old jealousy about Romeiro. I will open heart to heart, and tell the good brother that it is indeed his sister I love, and that eternally." His cheeks glowed, his heart flamed, he stood, priest-like, before the altar of friends.h.i.+p, with the fairest offering, sincerity. "O Charles," said he, "now, perhaps, she might be otherwise disposed towards thee. My father is travelling with her, and thou wilt see her." He took his hand, and went with him more quickly up to a dark group of trees, to unfold, in the shadow, his tenderly blus.h.i.+ng soul. "Take my most precious secret," he began, "but speak not of it,--not even with me. Dost thou not guess it, my first brother? The soul that I have loved, as long as I have loved thee?"--softly, very softly he added,--"thy sister?" and sank on his lips to kiss away the first sounds.

But Charles, in the tumult of rapture and of love, like an earth at the up-coming of Spring, could not contain himself; he pressed him to himself; he let him go; he embraced him again; he wept for bliss; he shut to Albano's eyes, and said, as if he had found his sister anew, "Brother!" In vain did Albano seek to stifle, with his hand, every other syllable on his lips. He began to paint to the excited youth--who, amid the secluded and poetic book-world, had acquired a higher tenderness than the actual intercourse of society teaches--the portrait of Liana; how she did and suffered; how she watched and pleaded for him, and even impoverished herself to wipe out his debts; how she never severely blamed, but only mildly entreated him, and all that, not from artificial patience, but from genuine, ardent love; and how this, after all, made up hardly the accessories of her picture. In this purer inspiration than the foregoing evening had granted him, what crowned his bliss was, that he could love his sister, among all beings, the most intensely and the most disinterestedly, and with a love the most free from poetic luxury and caprice. Really strengthened by the feeling that he could, for once, exult with a pure and holy affection, he lifted once more in freedom his disengaged hands, hitherto, like Milo's, jammed and caught in the tree of happiness and life, which he would fain have torn open; he breathed fresh, living air and courage, and the plan of his inner perfection was now gracefully rounded by new good fortune and a consciousness full of fair objects.

The moon stood high in heaven, the clouds had been driven away, and never did the morning-star rise brighter on two human beings.

FOOTNOTES:

[120] At the canonization of a saint, the _Devil_ was heard by _attorney_, in the shape of objections to the act. Jean Paul, with a slight variation of the sense of the old t.i.tle, hints a converse process in Roquairol's case, making the better angel show cause why sentence of _d.a.m.nation_ should not be absolutely p.r.o.nounced against him.--TR.

[121] Here began Jean Paul's second volume of the t.i.tan.--TR.

[122] Ottar of Roses.--TR.

[123] The above description of Roquairol reminds one of a German _Sinn-spruch_ on sensuality, from the Persian:--

"Make his reason serve his pa.s.sions, That is what man never should; _To the Devil's kitchen, angels_ _Never carry wood_."

[124] Simon's Christian Antiquities. Mursinna, &c., p. 143.

[125] Branch candlestick.--TR.

[126] Schlendrians,--of a slow fellow,--corresponding to our _old fogy_.--TR.

[127] Or Black-book.--TR.

[128] Allusion to the mode of angling for frogs with a bit of red cloth.

[129] Spazier-sitzerinnen,--not _gangerinnen_, i. e.

street-walkers.--TR.

[130] _Zwinger_ means, originally, the narrow s.p.a.ce between town-walls and town.--TR.

[131] Literally, press something before his brow.--TR.

[132] Overseer, a Lacedaemonian officer.--TR.

[133] Strangers who are frozen are placed by the monks, unburied, beside each other, each leaning on the next one's breast.

[134] Linda de Romeiro.

ELEVENTH JUBILEE.

EMBROIDERY.--ANGLAISE.--CEREUS SERPENS.--MUSICAL FANTASIES.

56. CYCLE.

Joyfully did Roquairol, on the first evening when he knew his father had gone a journey, bear to his friend the invitation to go with him to his mother. Albano blushed charmingly for the first time, at the thought of that fiery night which had wrung from him the oldest mystery; for hitherto neither of them, in the common hours of life, had retouched the sacred subject. Only the Captain could easily and willingly speak of Linda as well as of every other loss.

Liana always beheld her brother--the creator and ruling spirit of her softest hours--with the heartiest joy, although he generally wanted to get something when he came; for joy she flew to meet him, with the book in her hand which she had been reading as her mother embroidered. She and her mother had spent the whole day pleasantly and alone, alternately relieving each other at embroidering and reading; as often as the Minister travelled, they were at once free from discord and from the visiting Charivari. With what emotion did Albano recognize the eastern chamber, from which he had seen, for the first time, the dear maiden, only as a blind one, standing in the distance between watery columns!

The good Liana received him more unconstrainedly than he could meet her, after Charles's initiation into his wishes. What a paradisiacal mingling of unaffected shyness and overflowing friendliness, stillness and fire, of bashfulness and grace of movement, of playful kindness, of silent consciousness! Therefore belongs to her the magnificent surname of Virgil, the maidenly. In our days of female Jordan-almonds, academical, strong-minded women, of hop-dances and double-quick-march steps in the flat-shoe, the Virgilian t.i.tle is not often called for. Only for ten years (reckoning from the fourteenth) can I give it to a maiden; afterward she becomes more manneristic. Such a graceful being is usually at once thirteen and seventeen years old.

Why wast thou so bewitchingly unembarra.s.sed, tender Liana! excepting because thou, like the Bourignon, didst not once know what was to be avoided, and because thy holy guilelessness excluded the suspicious spying out of remote designs, the bending of the ear toward the ground to listen for an approaching foe, and all coquettish manifestoes and warlike preparations? Men were as yet to thee commanding fathers and brothers; and therefore didst thou lift upon them, not yet _proudly_, but so _affectionately_, that true pair of eyes!

And with this good-natured look, and with her smile,--whose continuance is often, on _men's_ faces, but not on _maidens'_, the t.i.tle-vignette of falsehood,--she received our n.o.ble youth, but not him alone.

She seated herself at the embroidery-frame; and the mother soon launched the Count out into the cool, high sea of general conversation, into which only occasionally the son threw up a green, warm island. Alban looked on to see how Liana made her mosaic flower-pieces grow; how the little white hand lay on the black satin ground (Froulay's _thorax_ is to wear the flowers on his birthday), and how her pure brow, over which the curly hair transparently waved, bent forward, and how her face, when she spoke, or when she looked after new colors of silk, lifted itself up, animated with the higher glow of industry in the eye and on the cheek. Charles sometimes hastily stretched out his hand towards her. She willingly reached hers across; he laid it between his two, and turned it over, looked into the palm, pressed it with both hands, and the brother and sister smiled upon each other affectionately. And each time Albano turned from his conversation with the mother, and true-heartedly smiled with them. But poor hero! It is of itself a Herculean labor to sit idly by where fine work is going on, such as embroidery, miniature painting, &c.; but above all, with a spirit like thine, which has so many sails, together with a couple of storms in behind, to lie inactively at anchor beside the embroidery-frame, and not to be, say, a spinning Hercules (that were easy), but only one that sees spinning,--and that, too, in the presence of a great spring and sunset out of doors,--and, in addition to all this, in the company of a mother, so chary of her words (in fact, before any mother, it is of itself an impossibility to introduce an edifying conversation with the daughter),--these are sore things.

He looked down sharply at the embroidered Flora. "Nothing pains me so much," said he,--for he always philosophized, and everything useless on the earth troubled him grievously,--"as that so many thousand artificial ornaments should be created in vain in the world, without a single eye ever meeting and enjoying them. It will touch me very nearly if this green leaflet here is not especially observed." With the same sorrow over fruitless, unenjoyed plantings of labor, he often shut his eyes upon wall-paper foliage, upon worked flowers, upon architectural decorations. Liana might have taken it as a painter's censure of the overladen st.i.tch-garden, which, merely out of love for her father, she was sowing so full,--for Froulay, born in the days when they still trimmed the gold-lace with clothes, rather than the reverse, was fond of b.u.t.toning a little silk herbary round his body,--but she only smiled, and said, "Well, the little leaf has surely escaped that evil destiny: it _is_ observed."

"What matters a thing's being forgotten and useless?" said Roquairol, taking up the word, full of indifference to the Lector, who was just entering, and full of indifference to the opinion of his mother, to whom, as well as to his father, only the entreaties of his sister sometimes made him submissive. "Enough that a thing _is_. The birds sing and the stars move in majesty over the wildernesses, and no man sees the splendor. In fact, everywhere, in and out of man, more pa.s.ses unseen than seen. Nature draws out of endless seas, and without exhausting them; we, too, are a nature, and should draw and pour out, and not be always anxiously reckoning upon the profit, for watering purposes, of every transient shower and rainbow. Just keep on embroidering, sister!"

he concluded, ironically.

"The Princess comes to-day!" said the Lector, and, delighted with the prospect, Liana kissed her mother's hand. She looked up often and confidentially from her embroidery at the courtier, who seemed to be very intimate, but who, as a refined man, was full as much respected and as respectful as if he were there for the first time.

The announcement of the Princess set the Captain into a charming state of easy good-humor; a female part was to him as necessary for society as to the French for an opera, and the presence of a lady helped him as much in teaching, as the absence of a b.u.t.ton did Kant.[135] By way of drawing his sister off from the flowers, he removed the red veil from a statue on the card-table, and threw it, like a little red dawn, over the lilies on the face of the embroideress; just then the door opened and Julienne entered. Liana, trying to remove the veil, in her haste to welcome her, entangled herself in the little red dawn. Albano mechanically reached out to her his hand to relieve her of the veil, and she gave it to him, and a dear, full look besides. O how his enraptured eye shone!

Julienne brought with her a train of _jeux d'esprit_. The Captain, who, like a pyrotechnist, could give his fire all forms and colors, reinforced her with his; and his sister sowed, as it were, the flowers with which the zephyrettes of raillery could play. Julienne almost said no to yes, and yes to no; only toward the Minister's lady was she serious and submissive,--a sign that, on her arena of disputation, among the grains of sand particles of golden sand still lay, whereas for philosophers the arena is the prize and the ground,--at once the battle-field, the _Champ de Mars_, and the _Champs Elysees_. Upon the Count she fixed her pa.s.sionate gaze as boldly as only princesses may venture to and love to; and when he returned the glance of her brown eye, she cast it down; but she remembered him, from her old visit in Blumenbuhl, and inquired after his friends. He now entered with pleasure upon something that was as ardent as his own soul,--encomiums. It is against the finest politeness to praise or blame persons with warmth,--things one may. While he portrayed with grateful remembrance his sister Rabette, Julienne became so earnestly and deeply absorbed in his eye, that she started, and asked the Lector about the steps of the _Anglaise_ which he had led at the masquerade. When he had done his best to give an idea of it, she said she had not understood a word of what he had been saying; one must, after all, execute it.

And herewith I suddenly introduce my fair readers in a body to a domestic ball of two couples. See the two sisters-in-soul, side by side, like two wings on _one_ dove, harmoniously flutter up and down. Albano had expected Julienne would form a contrast, by nimble and sprightly fluttering, to the still, hovering movement of her friend; but both undulated lightly, like waves, by and through each other, and there was not a motion too much nor too swift.

Hence I have so often wished that maidens might always dance exactly like the Graces and the Hours,--that is to say, only with one another, not with us gentlemen. The present union of the female wave-line with the masculine swallow-like zigzag, as well in dress as in motion, does not remarkably beautify the dance.

Liana a.s.sumed a new ethereal form, somewhat as an angel while flying back into heaven lays aside his graceful earthly one. The dancing-floor is to woman's beauty what the horse's back is to ours; on both the mutual enchantment unfolds itself, and only a rider can match a dancing maiden. Fortunate Albano! thou who hardly dar'st take the finger-points of Liana's offered hand in thine! thou gettest enough. And only look at this friendly maiden, whose eyes and lips Charis so smilingly brightens for the dance, and who yet, on the other hand, appears so touchingly, because she is a little pale! How different from those capricious or inflexible step-sisters, who, with half a Cato of Utica on the wrinkled or tightly stretched face, hop, fall back, and slip round. Julienne flies joyfully to and fro; and it is hard to say before whose eyes she loves to flutter best, Liana's or Albano's.