Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist

by Heinrich von Kleist

  Many weeks went by, during which, with mixed emotions, the family eagerly awaited the outcome of this curious affair. The commandant received from General K . . . , the count’s uncle, a courteous reply; the count himself wrote from Naples; the inquiries made about him elicited responses much to his advantage; in short, the engagement was already considered as good as done when the marquise’s mysterious malady returned, manifesting itself more vehemently than before. She observed an incomprehensible transformation of her figure. This she revealed with a complete openness to her mother and said she did not know what to make of her condition. Deeply concerned by the strange signs of illness in her daughter, the mother asked her to seek a physician’s advice. The marquise resisted, believing in the strength of her willpower to help her get better; she spent several more days of great suffering without heeding her mother’s advice, until ever reawakening feelings of such a curious character aroused the greatest distress. She asked to be examined by a physician whom her father trusted, and in light of her mother’s absence, bid him be seated on her couch, and following a brief introduction, jokingly revealed her own prognosis. The doctor gave her a piercing look, kept silent a while following a thorough examination, and finally replied with a sober expression that Madame la Marquise had aptly diagnosed her condition. And in answer to her question: What did he mean by this? he responded frankly, and with a chuckle he was not able to squelch, that she was perfectly healthy and had no need of a physician. Whereupon the marquise gave him a very severe sidelong glare, rang for her servant, and bid him be gone. She muttered half to herself, as though she did not deem him worthy of address, that she had no desire to jest about matters of this sort. Feeling slighted, the doctor replied that he had to hope she was always so disinclined to jest as she was now; took his hat and walking stick and made ready to leave. The marquise assured him that she would inform her father of this offense. The doctor replied that he was prepared to present his testimony in court, opened the door, bowed and was about to leave. But as he bent down to pick up a glove he’d let fall, the marquise inquired as to the likelihood thereof. The doctor replied that he surely did not need to elaborate on the reasons for his diagnosis, bowed again and walked away.

  The marquise stood there as though struck by lightning. She pulled herself together and was about to hasten off to her father; but the strange seriousness of the man from whose words she had taken offense simultaneously made her freeze in her tracks. Deeply distraught, she flung herself on the sofa. Distrusting herself, she ran through every moment of the past year and doubted her own sanity when she reflected on what had just transpired. Finally, her mother appeared, and in response to her dumbfounded question: “What in Heaven’s name has so upset you?” the daughter related what the doctor had just revealed. Madame von G . . . called him shameless and contemptible and encouraged her daughter to go ahead and tell her father of the offense. The marquise assured her that the doctor’s diagnosis was made in all seriousness, and that he appeared to be prepared to repeat it to her father face to face. Whereupon, a bit taken aback, Madame von G . . . asked if there was any reason to consider such a possibility? To which the marquise replied: She could sooner conceive of graves growing fecund and corpses giving birth! “Well then, you stir-brained woman,” said Madame von G . . . , hugging her close, “what in the world do you have to worry about? If your conscience is clear, why pay any mind to a doctor’s diagnosis, even if it’s from an entire cabinet of medical men? Whether it’s a mistake or a mean-spirited prank, what difference does it make? Still it’s only right and proper that we let your father know of this.” “Oh, God!” cried the marquise with a convulsive gesture, “How can I becalm myself? Don’t I have my own inner, all-too-familiar feeling testifying against me? Would I not, were I to recognize this selfsame feeling in someone else, conclude of her that the diagnosis is right?” “How ghastly!” remarked the commandant’s wife. “Malevolence! Mistake!” the marquise muttered. “What in Heaven’s name could have made this man, who to this very day seemed so honorable to us, insult me in such a willful and contemptible way? I who received him in confidence and in anticipation of future gratitude? Before whom, as his very first words affirmed, he appeared with a clean and pure-hearted determination, to help, not to hurt, yet bestirred more cruelty than I could ever have imagined? And if, for lack of any other possible explanation, I must ascribe it to some mistake,” the marquise continued, as her mother looked at her dumfounded, “is it possible that a doctor of even middling competence could err in such a case?” “And nevertheless,” the commandant’s wife replied with a hint of sarcasm, “it must have been one or the other.” “Yes, indeed, my dearest mother,” affirmed the marquise, kissing her hand, as she peered back, red in the face, with a look of injured pride, “it must be so, although the circumstances are so strange as to countenance my doubt. I swear, because you rightfully seek assurance, that my conscience is like that of my children; no cleaner, dearest one, could theirs be. But still, I beg you, get me a midwife, so that I may confirm my condition, and whatever it be, be sure of it.” “A midwife she wants!” cried Madame von G . . . in a tone of disgrace. “A clean conscience and a midwife!” Whereupon she fell silent. “A midwife, my dearest mother,” the marquise repeated, flinging herself on her knees before her, “at once, lest I go mad.” “Gladly,” replied the commandant’s wife, “but if you please, do your child-bearing outside this house.” At that she stood up and was about to leave the room. But following her with outstretched arms, the marquise fell on her face and embraced her knees. “If my blameless life, a life lived following your example, entitled me to your esteem,” she cried, with an eloquence fostered by pain, “if any motherly feeling for me still stirs in your breast, at least until my guilt has been proven without the shadow of a doubt, I beg you, do not abandon me at this awful moment.” “What is it that troubles you so?” asked the mother. “Is it nothing but the doctor’s diagnosis? Nothing more than your inner feeling?” “Nothing more, dear mother,” replied the marquise, and lay her hand on her breast. “Nothing, Julietta?” her mother pressed. “Think carefully. A moral lapse, as unspeakably much it would hurt me, is pardonable, and I would be obliged to pardon it; but if, to avoid a motherly rebuke, you were to concoct some fanciful fable of the overturning of the natural order, and back it up with blasphemous oaths just to impose upon the weakness of my all too gullible heart, that would be shameless; I would never be able to open my heart to you again.” “Would that the gates of paradise would one day be flung so wide open to me as my soul now is to you,” cried the marquise. “I have kept nothing from you.” This last declaration expressed with such pathos rattled her mother to the core. “Oh Heavens,” she cried, “my dearly beloved child! How much you move me!” And she picked her daughter up off the ground, and kissed her, and pressed her to her breast. “What then, in God’s name, do you fear? Come, child, you are not well.” She wanted to lead her to bed. But with tears running down her cheeks, the marquise assured her that she was perfectly healthy, that nothing ailed her save her curious and inconceivable condition. “Condition!” the mother cried again, “What kind of condition? If your memory of past occurrences is so certain, what fearful whimsy could have gripped you? Can an inner feeling, roused in some dark cavity, not be a delusion?” “No! No!” said the marquise, “it’s no delusion. And if you call for the midwife, mother, she will confirm that this terrible, devastating thing is true. “Come now, my darling daughter,” said Madame von G . . . , concerned for her sanity. “Come, follow me, and lay yourself down in bed. Whatever did you imagine the doctor might have said? Your face is afire! You’re trembling all over! What in Heaven’s name did the doctor tell you?” Incredulous now of all that transpired and doubting everything her daughter told her, she gently drew her daughter forward. The marquise protested: “Dearest, most precious mother!” a smile breaking through her veil of tears. “I assure you I have all my wits about me. The doctor told me that I was heavy with child. Let the midwife
come, and as soon as she says it isn’t so I’ll calm down.” “As you wish, as you wish,” replied the commandant’s wife, squelching her fear. “She’ll be here presently, presently, my dear, if you’re determined to make her laugh, and tell you you’re a dreamer and a little touched to boot.” Whereupon she rang for her servant and promptly had her fetch the midwife.

  The marquise still lay with restlessly heaving breast in her mother’s arms when the woman appeared, and the mother informed her of the strange delusion that made her daughter take sick. Madame la Marquise swore that she had never strayed from virtue, and yet, nevertheless, consumed by a strange feeling, she insisted that she be examined by an expert in these intimate matters. Nodding as she listened, the midwife spoke of young blood and the guiles of this cruel world; and having completed her examination, remarked that such cases were not uncommon, that the young widows who found themselves in this condition all maintained that they’d been living on a desert island. Trying to comfort the marquise, she assured her that the hardy corsair who’d stolen into her bedchamber at night would turn up again. At these words, the marquise fainted. Unable to subdue her maternal instincts, Madame von G . . . brought her back to consciousness with the aid of the midwife. But her anger took the upper hand once her daughter had awakened. “Julietta!” the mother cried out in pain, yet still inclined to some kind of reconciliation. “Will you bear your heart? Will you tell me who the father is?” But when the marquise replied that she was going mad, the mother rose from the couch and muttered: “Go! Go now, you contemptible creature! Cursed be the day I bore you!” and promptly stormed out.

  Once again feeling faint in the bright daylight, the marquise pulled the midwife toward her and lay her trembling head upon her breast. She asked in a halting voice if the laws of nature ever erred, and if there were any possibility of an unconscious conception? The midwife smiled, loosened the kerchief round her neck and said that surely the marquise knew better. “No, no,” replied the marquise, “of course I was conscious, I just wanted to know in general if such a thing were possible in nature.” The midwife replied that, to her knowledge, except for the Virgin Mary, such a thing had never happened to any woman on earth. The marquise trembled ever more violently. She thought at any moment she might die, and pressing the midwife to her in an anguished frenzy, begged her not to leave. “There, there,” the midwife tried to mollify her grief. She assured her that the birth was still a long time coming, suggested that, under such circumstances, there were ways to save one’s reputation, and assured her that everything would turn out all right in the end. But since these attempts at comforting felt like knife wounds in her unhappy breast, she pulled herself together, said she felt better and bid the woman take her leave.

  No sooner had the midwife left the room than the marquise received a note from her mother that said: “Sir von G . . . requests, given the circumstances, that you leave his house. He sends you, enclosed herewith, the papers concerning your financial affairs and hopes that God may spare him the pain of seeing you again.” Once read, the note was drenched with tears; and in a corner she could still make out the erased word: “Dictated.” Pain welled up in the poor woman’s eyes. Weeping bitterly over her parents’ error and the injustice to which these fine people were misled, she marched to the rooms of her mother, who, she was told, was with her father; so she staggered to her father’s quarters. Finding the door locked, she collapsed before it, wailing, calling on all the saints in Heaven to vouch for her innocence. She may well have been lying there for several minutes when the forest warden strode out and, with burning eyes, exclaimed: “You’ve been told the commandant does not wish to see you.” The marquise cried out: “My dearest brother!” Sobbing, she forced her way into the room, and cried: “My most precious father!” and stretched her arms out to him. Catching sight of her, the commandant turned his back and hurried off to his bedroom. And when she followed him there, he cried: “Be gone!” and tried to slam the door shut; but when, wailing and pleading, she managed to keep him from shutting it in her face and barged in, he suddenly gave way and rushed to the far corner of the room and turned his back on her. She flung herself to the floor before him and, trembling all over, clasped his knees, just as a pistol he’d grabbed went off at the very moment he plucked it off the wall, and the shot went tearing through the ceiling. “God in Heaven!” cried the marquise, pale as death, and she rose up and dashed out of the room. “Horse up my carriage!” she said as soon as she’d returned to her own quarters; bone weary, she collapsed into a chair, hugged her children tightly, and had her bags packed. She had the youngest one between her knees and was just flinging a wrap around him, about to climb into her carriage, when the forest warden burst in, and on the orders of the commandant, demanded that she leave her children. “These children?” she asked, and stood up. “Tell your inhuman father that he can come and shoot me down, but that he can’t take my children from me!” And fortified with all the pride of her innocence, she picked up her children and carried them to her carriage with such a vehemence that her brother would not have dared intercede, and drove off.

  Impelled by the intense strain of all she’d been through to a better knowledge of her true self, she suddenly hoisted herself, as if by her own hand, out of the morass into which fate had flung her. The tumult that tore at her heart finally settled as soon as she got outside; her children, the beloved prize of her old life, she covered with kisses, and with a profound sense of satisfaction she considered what a great victory she had won over her brother through the sheer force of her clear conscience. Strong enough not to be shattered by this strange situation, her spirit surrendered completely to the grand, holy, and inexplicable scheme of things. She fathomed the impossibility of ever convincing her family of her innocence, understood that she would have to console herself, lest she be brought down, and it was only a matter of days after her arrival in V . . . that the pain gave way to her heroic resolve and her pride at having withstood life’s assaults. She decided to withdraw from all mundane pursuits and to devote herself with unstinting effort to the education of her two children, and to tend to the third, the gift that God had given her, with all her motherly love. She made plans in the coming weeks, once she’d gotten through the delivery, to see to the restoration of her lovely country estate, which had fallen into ruin during her lengthy absence; she considered, while seated in her garden knitting little hats and socks for little limbs, how best to comfortably rearrange the rooms, which one she would fill with books and in which one she could best set up her easel. And so she had completely come to terms with her life of cloistered seclusion before the time of Count F . . . ’s promised return from Naples. The gatekeeper had orders not to let anyone enter the house. Only the thought tormented her that the young life she had conceived in the greatest innocence and purity, and whose origin, precisely because it was more mysterious, seemed all the more godly than that of other people, should suffer any slurs in proper society. Then a curious idea suddenly occurred to her how she might find the father – an idea that, when she first thought of it, caused the knitting needles to fall from her hands. She ruminated on it through many a long sleepless night, turning it around and twisting it so that it rubbed against her deepest feelings, before thinking it through. She still bristled at the thought of engaging in any relations with the person who had so vilely deceived her, finally concluding that this individual surely must be among the dregs of society, and from wherever he may come, he could only belong to the ranks of the lowest and vilest scum. But since her sense of independence grew ever stronger in her, and she considered that a diamond is still a diamond no matter how coarse its setting, roused one morning by the beat of the young heart stirring in her womb, she had the singular announcement cited at the start of this story run in The M . . . Intelligencer.