Иоганн Гёте - Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

"The news of course affrighted us exceedingly; but the confessor bade us be at rest. Our poor brother had been narrowly enough observed: the boatman, in place of taking him across, proceeded with him to his cloister. Fatigued with watching for the space of four–and–twenty hours, he fell asleep, as the skiff began to rock him in the moonshine; and he did not awake, till he saw himself in the hands of his spiritual brethren; he did not recover from his amazement, till he heard the doors of the convent bolting behind him.

"Sharply touched at the fate of our brother, we reproached the confessor for his cruelty; but he soon silenced or convinced us by the surgeon's reason, that our pity was destructive to the patient. He let us know that he was not acting on his own authority, but by order of the bishop and his chapter; that by this proceeding, they intended to avoid all public scandal, and to shroud the sad occurrence under the veil of a secret course of discipline prescribed by the Church. Our sister they would spare; she was not to be told that her lover was her brother. The charge of her was given to a priest, to whom she had before disclosed her situation. They contrived to hide her pregnancy and her delivery. As a mother she felt altogether happy in her little one. Like most of our women, she could neither write, nor read writing: she gave the priest many verbal messages to carry to her lover. The latter, thinking that he owed this pious fraud to a suckling mother, often brought pretended tidings from our brother, whom he never saw; recommending her, in his name, to be at peace; begging of her to be careful of herself and of her child; and for the rest to trust in God.

"Sperata was inclined by nature to religious feelings. Her situation, her solitude increased this tendency; the clergyman encouraged it, in order to prepare her by degrees for an eternal separation. Scarcely was her child weaned, scarcely did he think her body strong enough for suffering agony of mind, when he began to paint her fault to her in most terrific colours, to treat the crime of being connected with a priest as a sort of sin against nature, as a sort of incest. For he had taken up the strange thought of making her repentance equal in intensity to what it would have been, had she known the true circumstances of her error. He thereby produced so much anxiety and sorrow in her mind; he so exalted the idea of the Church and of its head before her; showed her the awful consequences, for the weal of all men's souls, should indulgence in a case like this be granted, and the guilty pair rewarded by a lawful union; signifying too how wholesome it was to expiate such sins in time, and thereby gain the crown of immortality—that at last, like a poor criminal, she willingly held out her neck to the axe, and earnestly entreated that she might forever be divided from our brother. Having gained so much, the clergy left her the liberty (reserving to themselves a certain distant oversight) to live at one time in a convent, at another in her house, according as she afterwards thought good.

"Her little girl meanwhile was growing: from her earliest years, she had displayed an extraordinary disposition. When still very young, she could run, and move with wonderful dexterity: she sang beautifully, and learned to play upon the cithern almost of herself. With words, however, she could not express herself; and the impediment seemed rather to proceed from her mode of thought, than from her organs of speech. The feelings of the poor mother to her, in the mean time, were of the most painful kind: the expostulations of the priest had so perplexed her mind, that though she was not quite deranged, her state was far from being sane. She daily thought her crime more terrible and punishable; the clergyman's comparison of incest, frequently repeated, had impressed itself so deeply, that her horror was not less than if the actual circumstances had been known to her. The priest took no small credit for his ingenuity, with which he had contrived to tear asunder a luckless creature's heart. It was miserable to behold maternal love, ready to expand itself in joy at the existence of her child, contending with the horrid feeling, that this child should not be there. The two emotions strove together in her soul; love was often weaker than aversion.

"The child had long ago been taken from her, and committed to a worthy family residing on the sea–shore. In the greater freedom, which the little creature enjoyed here, she soon displayed her singular delight in climbing. To mount the highest peaks, to run long the edges of the ships, to imitate in all their strangest feats the rope–dancers, whom she often saw in the place, seemed a natural tendency in her.

"To practise these things with the greater ease, she liked to change clothes with boys: and though her foster parents thought this highly blameable and unbecoming, we bade them indulge her as much as possible. Her wild walks and leapings often led her to a distance; she would lose her way, and be long from home, but she always came back. In general, as she returned, she used to set herself beneath the columns in the portal of a country house in the neighbourhood: her people now had ceased to look for her; they waited for her. She would there lie resting on the steps: then run up and down the large hall, looking at the statues; after which, if nothing specially detained her, she used to hasten home.

"But at last our confidence was balked, and our indulgence punished. The child went out, and did not come again: her little hat was found swimming on the water, near the spot where a torrent rushed down into the sea. It was conjectured that, in clambering among the rocks, her foot had slipped; all our searching could not find the body.

"The thoughtless tattle of her house–mates soon communicated the occurrence to Sperata; she seemed calm and cheerful when she heard it; hinting not obscurely at her satisfaction that God had pleased to take her poor little child to himself, and thus preserved it from suffering or causing some more dreadful misery.

"On this occasion, all the fables which are told about our waters came to be the common talk. The sea, it was said, required every year an innocent child: yet it would endure no corpse, but sooner or later throw it to the shore; nay the last joint, though sunk to the lowest bottom, must again come forth. They told the story of a mother, inconsolable because her child had perished in the sea, who prayed to God and his saints to grant her at least the bones for burial. The first storm threw ashore the skull, the next the spine; and after all was gathered, she wrapped the bones in a cloth, and took them to the church: but O! miraculous to tell! as she crossed the threshold of the temple, the packet grew heavier and heavier, and at last, when she laid it on the steps of the altar, the child began to cry and issued living from the cloth. One joint of the right–hand little finger was alone wanting: this too the mother anxiously sought and found; and in memory of the event it was preserved among the other relics of the church.

"On poor Sperata these recitals made a deep impression: her imagination took a new flight, and favoured the emotion of her heart. She supposed that now the child had expiated, by its death, both its own sins, and the sins of its parents: that the curse and penalty, which hitherto had overhung them all, was at length wholly removed; that nothing more was necessary, could she only find the child's bones, that she might carry them to Rome, where upon the steps of the great altar in St. Peter's, her little girl, again covered with its fair fresh skin, would stand up alive before the people. With its own eyes it would once more look on father and mother; and the Pope, convinced that God and his saints commanded it, would, amid the acclamations of the people, remit the parents their sins, acquit them of their oaths, and join their hands in wedlock.