Коллектив авторов - The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 04

"What a people!" said Albano. "Here curled the giant snake five times about Christianity. Like a smile of scorn lies the moonlight down below there upon the green arena, where once stood the Colossus of the Sun-god. The star of the north 9 9 The Pole-star, as well as other northern constellations, stands lower in the south. glimmers low through the windows, and the Serpent and the Bear crouch. What a world has gone by!" The Princess answered that "twelve thousand prisoners built this theatre, and that a great many more had bled therein." "O! we too have building prisoners," said he, "but for fortifications; and blood, too, still flows, but with sweat! No, we have no present; the past, without it, must bring forth a future."

The Princess went to break a laurel-twig and pluck a blooming wall-flower. Albano sank away into musing: the autumnal wind of the past swept over the stubble. On this holy eminence he saw the constellations, Rome's green hills, the glimmering city, the Pyramid of Cestius; but all became Past, and on the twelve hills dwelt, as upon graves, the lofty old spirits, and looked sternly into the age, as if they were still its kings and judges.

"This to remember the place and time!" said the approaching Princess, handing him the laurel and the flower. "Thou mighty One! a Coliseum is thy flower-pot; to thee is nothing too great, and nothing too small!" said he, and threw the Princess into considerable confusion, till she observed that he meant not her, but nature. His whole being seemed newly and painfully moved, and, as it were, removed to a distance: he looked down after his father, and went to find him; he looked at him sharply, and spoke of nothing more this evening.

From the Flegeljahre (1804)

By JEAN PAUL

TRANSLATED BY FRANCES H. KING

Since Haslau had been a princely residence no one could remember any event—the birth of the heir apparent excepted—that had been awaited with such curiosity as the opening of the Van der Kabel will. Van der Kabel might have been called the Haslau Croesus—and his life described as a pleasure-making mint, or a washing of gold sand under a golden rain, or in whatever other terms wit could devise. Now, seven distant living relatives of seven distant deceased relatives of Kabel were cherishing some hope of a legacy, because the Croesus had sworn to remember them. These hopes, however, were very faint. No one was especially inclined to trust him, as he not only conducted himself on all occasions in a gruffly moral and unselfish manner—in regard to morality, to be sure, the seven relatives were still beginners—but likewise treated everything so derisively and possessed a heart so full of tricks and surprises that there was no dependence to be placed upon him. The eternal smile hovering around his temples and thick lips, and the mocking falsetto voice, impaired the good impression that might otherwise have been made by his nobly cut face and a pair of large hands, from which New Year's presents, benefit performances, and gratuities were continually falling. Wherefore the birds of passage proclaimed the man, this human mountain-ash in which they nested and of whose berries they ate, to be in reality a dangerous trap; and they seemed hardly able to see the visible berries for the invisible snares.

Between two attacks of apoplexy he made his will and deposited it with the magistrate. Though half dead when, he gave over the certificate to the seven presumptive heirs he said in his old tone of voice that he did not wish this token of his decease to cause dejection to mature men whom he would much rather think of as laughing than as weeping heirs. And only one of them, the coldly ironical Police-Inspector Harprecht, answered the smilingly ironical Croesus: "It was not in their power to determine the extent of their collective sympathy in such a loss."

At last the seven heirs appeared with their certificate at the city hall. These were the Consistorial Councilor Glanz, the Police Inspector, the Court-Agent Neupeter, the Attorney of the Royal Treasury Knol, the Bookseller Passvogel, the Preacher-at-Early-Service Flachs, and Herr Flitte from Alsace. They duly and properly requested of the magistrates the charter consigned to the latter by the late Kabel, and asked for the opening of the will. The chief executor of the will was the officiating Burgomaster in person, the under-executors were the Municipal-Councilors. Presently the charter and the will were fetched from the Council-chamber into the Burgomaster's office, they were passed around to all the Councilors and the heirs, in order that they might see the privy seal of the city upon them, and the registry of the consignment written by the town clerk upon the charter was read aloud to the seven heirs. Thereby it was made known to them that the charter had really been consigned to the magistrates by the late departed one and confided to them scrinio rei publicæ , likewise that he had been in his right mind on the day of the consignment. The seven seals which he himself had placed upon it were found to be intact. Then—after the Town-Clerk had again drawn up a short record of all this—the will was opened in God's name and read aloud by the officiating Burgomaster. It ran as follows:

"I, Van der Kabel, do draw up my will on this seventh day of May 179-, here in my house in Haslau, in Dog Street, without a great ado of words, although I have been both a German notary and a Dutch dominé . Notwithstanding, I believe that I am still sufficiently familiar with the notary's art to be able to act as a regular testator and bequeather of property.

"Testators are supposed to commence by setting forth the motives which have caused them to make their will. These with me, as with most, are my approaching death, and the disposal of an inheritance which is desired by many. To talk about the funeral and such matters is too weak and silly. That which remains of me, however, may the eternal sun above us make use of for one of his verdant springs, not for a gloomy winter!

"The charitable bequests, about which notaries must always inquire, I shall attend to by setting aside for three thousand of the city's paupers an equal number of florins so that in the years to come, on the anniversary of my death, if the annual review of the troops does not happen to take place on the common that day, they can pitch their camp there and have a merry feast off the money, and afterward clothe themselves with the tent linen. To all the schoolmasters of our Principality also I bequeath to every man one august d'or, and I leave my pew in the Court church to the Jews of the city. My will being divided into clauses, this may be taken as the first.

It is the general custom for legacies and disinheritances to be counted among the most essential parts of the will. In accordance with this custom Consistorial Councillor Glanz, Attorney of the Royal Treasury Knol, Court-Agent Peter Neupeter, Police-Inspector Harprecht, the Preacher-at-Early-Service Flachs, the Court-bookseller Passvogel and Herr Flitte, for the time being receive nothing; not so much because no Trebellianica is due them as the most distant relatives, or because most of them have themselves enough to bequeath, as because I know out of their own mouths that they love my insignificant person better than my great wealth, which person I therefore leave them, little as can be got out of it."

Seven preternaturally long faces at this point started up like the Seven-sleepers. The Consistorial Councillor, a man still young but celebrated throughout all Germany for his oral and printed sermons, considered himself the one most insulted by such taunts. From the Alsatian Flitte there escaped an oath accompanied by a slight smack of the tongue. The chin of Flachs, the Preacher-at-Early-Service, grew downward into a regular beard.