The Best Tales of Hoffmann

by E. T. A. Hoffmann

  Ulla implored him with bitter tears to give up all idea of such a dreamlike undertaking, for she felt a strong presentiment of disaster; but Ellis declared that without this stone he should never know a moment’s peace or happiness, and that there was not the slightest danger of any kind. He pressed her fondly to his heart, and was gone.

  The guests were all assembled to accompany the bridal pair to the church of Copparberg, where they were to be married, and a crowd of girls, who were to be the bridesmaids and walk in procession before the bride (as is the custom of the place), were laughing and playing round Ulla. The musicians were tuning their instruments to begin a wedding march. It was almost noon, but Elis had not made his appearance. Suddenly some miners came running up, horror in their pale faces, with the news that there had been a terrible catastrophe, a subsidence of the earth, which had destroyed the whole of Pehrson Dahlsjoe’s part of the mine.

  “Elis! oh, Elis! you are gone! ” screamed Ulla, wildly, and fell as if dead. Then for the first time Dahlsjoe learned from the Captain that Elis had gone down the main shaft in the morning. Nobody else had been in the mine, the rest of the men having been invited to the wedding. Dahlsjoe and all the others hurried off to search, at the imminent danger of their own lives. In vain! Elis Froebom was not to be found. There could be no question but that the earth-fall had buried him in the rock. And thus came desolation and mourning upon the house of brave Pehrson Dahlsjoe, at the moment when he thought he was assured of peace and happiness for the remainder of his days.

  Long had stout Pehrson Dahlsjoe been dead, his daughter Ulla long lost sight of and forgotten. Nobody in Falun remembered them. More than fifty years had gone by since Froebom’s luckless wedding day, when it chanced that some miners who were making a connection passage between two shafts found, at a depth of three hundred yards, buried in vitriolated water, the body of a young miner, which seemed when they brought it to the daylight to be turned to stone.

  The young man looked as if he were lying in a deep sleep, so perfectly preserved were the features of his face, so wholly without trace of decay his new suit of miner’s clothes, and even the flowers in his breast. The people of the neighbourhood all collected round the young man, but no one recognized him or could say who he had been, and none of the workmen missed any comrade.

  The body was going to be taken to Falun, when out of the distance an old, old woman came creeping slowly and painfully up on crutches.

  “Here’s the old St. John’s Day grandmother!” the miners said. They had given her this name because they had noticed that every year she came up to the main shaft on Saint John’s Day, and looked down into its depths, weeping, lamenting, and wringing her hands as she crept round it, then went away again.

  The moment she saw the body she threw away her crutches, lifted her arms to Heaven, and cried, in the most heart-rending way.

  “Oh! Elis Froebom! Oh, my sweet, sweet bridegroom!”

  And she huddled down beside the body, took the stone hands and pressed them to her heart, chilled with age, but throbbing still with the fondest love, like some naphtha flame under the surface ice.

  “Ah!” she said, looking round at the spectators, “nobody, nobody among you remembers poor Ulla Dahlsjoe, this poor boy’s happy bride fifty long years ago. When I went away, in my terrible sorrow and despair, to Ornaes, old Torbern comforted me, and told me I should see my poor Elis, who was buried in the rock upon our wedding day, once more here upon earth. And I have come every year and looked for him. And now this blessed meeting has been granted me this day. Oh, Elis! Elis! my beloved husband!”

  She wound her arms about him as if she would never part from him more, and the people all stood around in the deepest emotion.

  Fainter and fainter grew her sobs and sighs, till they ceased to be audible.

  The miners closed around. They would have raised poor Ulla, but she had breathed out her life upon her bridegroom’s body. The spectators noticed now that it was beginning to crumble into dust. The appearance of petrifaction had been deceptive.

  In the church of Copparberg, where they were to have been married fifty years earlier, the miners laid in the earth the ashes of Elis Froebom, and with them the body of her who had been thus “Faithful unto death.”

  SIGNOR FORMICA

  I

  Celebrated people often have many ill things said of them, whether well-founded or not. And no exception was made in the case of that admirable painter Salvator Rosa, whose vivid, living pictures cannot fail to impart a keen and characteristic delight to those who look upon them.

  At the time that Salvator’s fame was ringing through Naples, Rome, and Tuscany—indeed, through all Italy—and painters who were desirous of gaining applause were trying to imitate his highly individual style, his malicious and envious rivals were spreading all sorts of evil reports intended to cast ugly black stains upon the glorious splendour of his artistic fame. They claimed that he had at a former period of his life belonged to a gang of banditti, and that it was to his experiences during this lawless time that he owed all the wild, fierce, fantastically attired figures which he introduced into his pictures, just as the gloomy fearful wildernesses of his landscapes (the selve selvagge, savage woods, to use Dante’s expression) were faithful representations of the haunts where the banditti lay hidden. What was worse still, they openly charged him with having been concerned in the atrocious and bloody revolt which had been set on foot by the notorious Masaniello in Naples. They even described the share he had taken in it, down to the minutest details.

  The rumour ran that Aniello Falcone, the painter of battle pieces, one of the best of Salvator’s masters, had been stung into fury and filled with bloodthirsty vengeance because the Spanish soldiers had slain one of his relatives in a street brawl. Without delay he gathered a band of wild and desperate young men, mostly painters, put arms into their hands, and gave them the name of the “Company of Death.” And in truth this band inspired all the fear and consternation suggested by its terrible name. At all hours of the day they wandered the streets of Naples in gangs, and cut down without mercy every Spaniard whom they met. They did more—they forced their way into the holy sanctuaries, and relentlessly murdered their unfortunate enemies who had taken refuge there. At night they gathered around their chief, the bloody-minded madman Masaniello, and painted him by torchlight, so that in a short time there were hundreds of these little pictures circulating in Naples and the surrounding area.

  This is the ferocious band of which Salvator Rosa was alleged to have been a member, working hard at butchering his fellow men by day, and by night working just as hard at painting. The truth about him has however been stated, by a celebrated art critic, Taillasson, I believe. “Salvator Rosa’s works are characterized by arrogant and defiant originality, and by fantastic energy both of conception and of execution. Nature revealed herself to him not in the lovely peacefulness of green meadows, flourishing fields, sweet-smelling groves, murmuring springs, but in the awful and the sublime as seen in towering masses of rock, in the wild seashore, in savage inhospitable forests; and the voices that he loved to hear were not the whisperings of the evening breeze or the musical rustle of leaves, but the roaring of the hurricane and the thunder of the cataract. To one viewing his desolate landscapes, with the strange savage figures stealthily moving about in them, here singly, there in troops, the uncomfortable thoughts arise unbidden, ‘Here’s where a fearful murder took place, there’s where the bloody corpse was hurled into the ravine.’ ”

  Admitting all this, and even that Taillasson is also right when he maintains that Salvator’s “Plato,” indeed, that even his “Holy St. John Proclaiming the Advent of the Saviour in the Wilderness,” look just a little like highway robbers—admitting this, I say, it is nevertheless unjust to argue from the character of the works to the character of the artist himself, and to assume that an artist who represents savage and terrible subjects with lifelike fidelity must himself have been a savage, terrible man. He
who prates most about the sword is often he who wields it the worst; he who feels in the depths of his soul all the horrors of a bloody deed, so that, taking the palette or the pencil or the pen in his hand, he is able to give living form to his feelings, is often the one least capable of practicing similar deeds.

  Enough! I don’t believe a single word of all those evil reports, by which men sought to brand the excellent Salvator an abandoned murderer and robber, and I hope that you, kindly reader, will share my opinion. Otherwise, I see grounds for fearing that you might perhaps entertain some doubts respecting what I am about to tell you of this artist. The Salvator I wish to put before you in this tale—that is, according to my conception of him-is a man bubbling over with the exuberance of life and fiery energy, but at the same time a man endowed with the noblest and most loyal character—a character which, like that of all men who think and feel deeply, is able even to control the bitter irony which arises from a clear view of the significance of life. I need scarcely add that Salvator was no less renowned as a poet and musician than as a painter. His genius was revealed in rays thrown in many directions.

  I repeat again, I do not believe that Salvator had any share in Masaniello’s bloody deeds; on the contrary, I think it was the horrors of that fearful time which drove him from Naples to Rome, where he arrived a poverty-stricken fugitive, just at the time that Masaniello fell.

  Not over well dressed, and with a scanty purse containing not more than a few bright sequins in his pocket, he crept through the gate just after nightfall. Somehow or other, he didn’t exactly know how, he wandered as far as the Piazza Navona. In better times he had once lived there in a large house near the Pamfili Palace. With an ill-tempered growl, he gazed up at the large plate-glass windows glistening and glimmering in the moonlight. “ Hm! ” he exclaimed ironically. “It’ll cost me dozens of yards of coloured canvas before I can open my studio up there again.” But suddenly he felt paralyzed in every limb, and at the same moment more weak and feeble than he had ever felt in his life before. “But shall I,” he murmured between his teeth as he sank down upon the stone steps leading up to the house door, “really be able to finish canvas enough in the way the fools want it done? I have a notion that that will be the end of it! ”

  A cold cutting night wind was blowing down the street. Salvator realized that he must find shelter. Rising with difficulty, he staggered on into the Corso, and then turned into the Via Bergognona. At last he stopped before a little house with only a couple of windows, inhabited by a poor widow and her two daughters. This woman had housed him for little money the first time he came to Rome, an unknown stranger ignored by everyone; and so he hoped to find a lodging with her again, such as would be best suited to his reduced circumstances.

  He knocked at the door, and several times shouted out his name. At last he heard the old woman slowly and reluctantly waking out of her sleep. She shuffled to the window in her slippers, and began to rain down a shower of abuse upon the scoundrel who was disturbing her in this way in the middle of the night; her house was not an inn, and so on. Then there ensued a good deal of talk back and forth before she recognized her former lodger’s voice. But when Salvator complained that he had fled from Naples and was unable to find a shelter in Rome, the old woman cried, “By all the blessed saints of Heaven! Is that you, Signor Salvator? Your little room above, that looks onto the court, is still empty, and the old fig-tree has pushed its branches right through the window and into the room, so that you can sit and work like you was in a beautiful cool arbour. Yes, and how pleased my girls will be that you have come back, Signor Salvator. But, d’ye know, my Margarita’s grown a big girl and fine-looking? You won’t give her any more rides on your knee now. And—and your cat, you know, three months ago she choked on a fishbone. But you know, my fat neighbour that you used to laugh at and draw cartoons of—she did marry that young fellow, Signor Luigi, after all. Ah well! nozze e magistrati sono da dio destinati [marriages and magistrates are made in heaven], they say.”

  “Signora Caterina,” cried Salvator, interrupting the old woman, “ I beg you by the blessed saints, let me in, and then tell me all about your fig-tree and your daughters, the cat and your fat neighbour—I am dying of weariness and cold.”

  “Bless me, how impatient we are,” rejoined the old woman. “Chi va piano va sano, chi va presto more lesto [walk slowly and have a long life; make haste and a widow’s your wife], I tell you. But you are tired, you are cold; where are the keys? Quick with the keys!”

  But the old woman still had to wake her daughters and kindle a fire—and she was a long time about it, such a long, long time. At last she opened the door and let poor Salvator in. Scarcely had he crossed the threshold than, overcome by fatigue and illness, he dropped on the floor as if dead. Happily the widow’s son, who lived at Tivoli, chanced to be at his mother’s that night. He at once gave up his bed to make room for the sick man.

  The old woman was very fond of Salvator, and she rated him above all other painters in the world. In everything that he did she took the greatest pleasure. She was therefore quite beside herself to see him in this sad condition, and wanted to run off to the neighbouring monastery to have her father confessor come and fight against the adverse power of the disease with consecrated candles or some powerful amulet or other. On the other hand, her son thought it would be almost better to see about getting an experienced physician at once, and off he ran there and then to the Piazza di Spagna, where he knew the distinguished Dr. Splendiano Accoramboni dwelt. No sooner did the doctor learn that the painter Salvator Rosa lay ill in the Via Bergognona than he declared himself ready to call and see the patient.

  Salvator lay unconscious, struck down by a most severe attack of fever. The old woman had hung up two or three pictures of saints above his bed, and was praying fervently. The girls, though bathed in tears, tried from time to time to get the sick man to swallow a few drops of the cooling lemonade which they had made, while their brother, who had taken his place at the head of the bed, wiped the cold sweat from Salvator’s brow. And so morning found them, when with a loud creak the door opened, and the celebrated Dr. Splendiano Accoramboni entered the room.

  If Salvator had not been so seriously ill that the two girl’s hearts were melted in grief, they would, I think (for they were in general frolicsome and saucy), have enjoyed a hearty laugh at the doctor’s extraordinary appearance, instead of retiring shyly, as they did, into the corner. It will indeed be worth while to describe the outward appearance of this little man who presented himself at Dame Caterina’s in the Via Bergognona in the gray of the morning. In spite of being rather tall as a boy, Dr. Splendiano Accoramboni had not been able to advance beyond the altitude of four feet. Moreover, in the days of his youth, he had been distinguished for his elegant figure. Before his head, always indeed somewhat ill-shaped, and his big cheeks, and his stately double chin had put on too much fat; before his nose had grown bulky and spread owing to overmuch indulgence in Spanish snuff; and before his little belly had assumed the shape of a wine-tub from too much fattening on macaroni—the garments of an Abbate, which he at that time affected, suited him down to the ground. He was then in truth a pretty little man, and accordingly the Roman ladies had styled him their caro puppazetto [sweet little doll].

  But these days were gone. A German painter, seeing Dr. Splendiano walking across the Piazza di Spagna, said—and he was perhaps not far wrong—that it looked as if some strapping fellow of six feet or so had walked away from his own head, which had fallen on the shoulders of a little marionette clown, who now had to carry it about as his own.

  This curious little figure walked about in patchwork—an immense quantity of pieces of Venetian damask of a large flower pattern that had been cut up in making a dressing-gown; high up around his waist he had buckled a broad leather belt, from which an excessively long rapier hung; while his snow-white wig was surmounted by a high conical cap, not unlike the obelisk in the Piazza San Pietro. Since the said wig, all tumbled
and tangled, spread out thick and wide all over his back, it might very well have been taken for the cocoon out of which a fine silkworm had crept.

  The worthy Splendiano Accoramboni stared through his big, bright spectacles, with his eyes wide open, first at his patient, then at Dame Caterina. Calling her aside, he croaked with bated breath, “There lies the great painter Salvator Rosa, and he’s lost if my skill doesn’t save him, Signora Caterina. Tell me when he came to lodge with you? Did he bring many beautiful large pictures with him?”

  “Ah! my dear doctor,” replied Signora Caterina, “the poor fellow only came last night. And as for pictures—why, I don’t know nothing about them; but there’s a big box below, and Salvator begged me to take very good care of it, before he became senseless like he now is. I suppose there’s a fine picture packed in it, as he painted in Naples.”

  What Signora Caterina said, however, was a falsehood; but we shall soon see that she had good reasons for imposing upon the doctor in this way.

  “Good! Very good!” said the doctor, simpering and stroking his beard; then, with as much solemnity as his long rapier, which kept catching in all the chairs and tables, would allow, he approached the sick man and felt his pulse, snorting and wheezing, so that it had a most curious effect in the midst of the reverential silence which had fallen upon all the rest. Then he ran over in Greek and Latin the names of a hundred and twenty diseases that Salvator had not, then almost as many which he might have had, and concluded by saying that on the spur of the moment he didn’t recollect the name of his disease, but that he would within a short time find a suitable one for it, and the proper remedies as well. Then he took his departure with the same solemnity with which he had entered, leaving them all full of trouble and anxiety.