“Go on, then,” he said to his interlocutor, “give me the Colloquia, and take the money from me.”
And, taking the book, he put 22 florins in the old man’s hand—which is to say, two more than the precious volume had sold for—then left the Octavius house at a slow pace, making the reflection that it was not prudent to stay at the sale any longer, for there was no reason why he shouldn’t acquire further books, without being aware of it, ten times over.
Once outside the house, he put Erasmus into his pocket and continued the stroll that had been interrupted by the involuntary visit to the Octavius residence.
Never, until then, had Franz been subject to as many dreams and hallucinations as he experienced in the hours that followed. His dreams conducted him so far that he perceived, when the Sun was already very low over the horizon, that he had been following the Main for a long time, and that he was no more than a short distance from the schloss of a relative who lived near Frankfurt—a relative he saw rarely, firstly because of the numerous society that he received and secondly because he was the father of the gracious Marguerite, the beautiful and naïve young woman who loved him—whom he avoided in order to run after science, that coquette who never unveils more than a fraction of her charms, in order never to satisfy all desire.
During the long walk he had, moreover, experienced a strange sensation: that little book by Erasmus had seemed to him have a weight disproportionate to its volume. He had been obliged to take it out of his pocket, as if it were made of lead, and carry it, sometimes in one hand and sometimes the other. That had ended up being so unbearable that 20 times over he had made the mechanical movement of throwing it away—but his fingers had seemed to clench around the parchment in which it was bound, unwilling to let go of it.
When Franz found himself outside the residence of his relative, the Margrave von Hersfeld, he thought about the long journey he would have to make to return home on foot, and took the chance of going in to ask for a place that the dinner that was about to be served. Everyone welcomed him with open arms; his beautiful cousin blushed with happiness when he bowed to her respectfully, and they sat down at table a few minutes after his arrival.
The Margrave’s guests were only seven or eight in number. Franz was seated next to an old man who had known his grandfather quite well, and whom he had sometimes seen himself. He was an old German, a stubborn philosopher, who would debate until the cows came home, and who was, moreover, an irrepressible Swedenborgian. In consequence the Baron von Heberghem barely touched the food that was served to him. The old man rendered easily evident to him the apparition of the Lord to Swedenborg in a London tavern. During the second course, he was convinced that nothing was truer than the conversations of the Swedish apostle with the illustrious dead evoked by him.
When night fell, he climbed into the carriage that had been harnessed to take him home full of these ideas. He had not mentioned his book to anyone, and had even forgotten it himself during the meal, but as soon as he was alone, that sensation of weight became manifest again. He deposited the Colloquia in the seat of the carriage, and arrived home an hour after his departure, without having given it another thought.
He found a blazing fire in his study, prepared by his manservant, who had begun to get anxious about his unaccustomed absence. He pushed an armchair in front of the fireplace, into which he let himself fall as if he were harassed by fatigue, and then closed his eyes.
After perhaps half an hour of dozing, Franz remembered the morning’s acquisition, and went to pick up the book, which he had set down on a sideboard as he came in. Remembering that Erasmus, in his Colloquia, had somewhat maltreated the pope and his monks, and being a Lutheran rather than anything else, he saw its reading as a means of passing the time according to his taste. It needed no more to decide him to leaf through a book, in spite of the late hour.
Having shaken and rubbed the covers of the Dutch philosopher’s work, in order to get rid of the dust, he opened it and, leaning toward the fire—for the only lamp illuminating the room was on the mantelpiece—he set about scanning those pages of the Colloquia in which the author recalls the privations he endured in his youth as a result of the recklessness of the Bishop of Cambrai. But the fine and caustic mind of Erasmus did not have what it took to please our dreamer for long. He had been reading for scarcely half an hour when, settling back into his armchair, he placed his book, open and upside-down, on a little table that as within arm’s each, and then allowed himself to be lulled yet again by his imagination.
At about midnight, Schmidt,20 his manservant, came in to tell him that his customary bed-time had arrived.
The servant, although he was not yet 50, was already an old retainer of the Heberghem family. He had followed Franz’s father over all the battlefields of Europe, and had been witness to a thousand follies on his master’s part—follies which, even more than his wounds, had caused him to die before his son could get to know him. As for the Baroness, she had died giving birth to the Heberghem’s sole heir. When Franz emerged from the hands of the tutor who whom the family council had entrusted his education, Schmidt had left with his young master for the university. There, he waited patiently, like a good and faithful German—which is to say, drinking beer and smoking interminable pipes—while the young Baron von Heberghem was sufficiently stuffed with philosophy, learned well enough how to sustain a thesis, parry a sword-thrust and became master of his fortune. He had paid little heed, during that time, to the young man’s character and lifestyle; it as only when they returned to Frankfurt, to the Heberghems’ town house, that he had noticed Franz’s taciturnity and his love of reverie and solitude—sentiments that the silence and severity of the parental home were to augment rapidly.
In fact, that huge dwelling—princely but empty, with a façade blackened by time, pointed roofs terminating in rusty weathervanes, and long obscure and sonorous vaults—resembled a tomb. Franz only reached his apartment after having closed a heavy door behind him whose hinges screeched as they turned, having climbed up a broad carpeted stone staircase, supporting himself on iron banisters that had once been gilded, on which his footsteps made no sound, and having traversed immense rooms ornamented with heavy velvet wall-hanging that choked the air and which only received, through gigantic stained-glass windows, a bizarre daylight full of sadness. It was necessary for him to open 20 brown-paneled doors, or have them opened for him, and pass in front of 20 ancestral portraits, which greeted him every morning and bade him goodnight every evening with same grave expressions or smiles on their lips. In order to get to his room he could have taken a little staircase that led directly to it, which was specifically dedicated to his use, but on the first day after his arrival in the house Schmidt had taken him through the large apartments; he had gone through them again the next day, then the day after, without taking any account of what he was experiencing in breathing their thick atmosphere, and once the habit was acquired, he went back every evening by the same route.
When Franz had sent his servant to have his apartment prepared, a few days after his return to Frankfurt, the worthy Schmidt had found the house so rich in wall-hangings and furniture of every sort that he had been content to take what seemed to be required at random, so Franz’s bedroom, study and dining-room differed very little from the other parts of the house. His bed was one of those huge items of Medieval furniture with tall twisted columns, which one could only reach with the aid of steps, and around which fell heavy, exceedingly smooth tapestries representing historic characters in full size. His bookshelves were massive, made of old oak carved like Chinese ivory, with monsters and demons grimacing from every partition; his work-desk, similarly made of heavy black oak was sustained by satyrs’ legs. An immense bronze inkwell, the work of some unknown Cellini, representing Marguerite at Faust’s feet, occupied one of its corners.
In his dining-room stood a gigantic dresser with its back to panels covered in embossed leather wall-hangings, which proudly displayed the Hebergh
em coat of arms. At the large table that occupied its center, which had been designed to accommodate 20 diners, Franz was always alone.
He had had a few paintings hung along the walls, but if all these canvases were signed with illustrious names, by a bizarre choice, only offered to the eyes the gravest subjects favored by the Spanish school, the severe monks of Zurbaran21 and the austere physiognomies reproduced so prolifically by Albrecht Dürer and his contemporaries. There was nothing young or cheerful in the apartment in which the young Baron von Heberghem lived.
If he stationed himself at the window of his study, his gaze was abruptly arrested by the impenetrable bushes in the grounds that extended behind the hotel. None of the multiple, joyful and lively sounds of the street reached him. Everything that surrounded him was like an unbreachable barrier raised by fatality between him and youth. Even the domestic servants had modeled themselves on the phlegmatic Schmidt; the service of the house was provided without a murmur; a bleak, lugubrious silence reigned in every part of the house; the dogs were reluctant to bark in their kennels, the horses lay down lazily in their straw without whinnying.
It is understandable with what ardor Franz, in his solitude, rummaged through the rich library that his father had left him. All philosophies, from antiquity to the present day, came together there. Without itemizing the Greek and Oriental philosophers, none was absent. Mingled there pell-mell were Swedenborg, with his mysticism and his angels; Descartes, with his vortices and his idealism; Montaigne and the entire Pyrrhonian school, with its skepticism and doubt; Bacon, with his sensualism; Locke, with his empiricism; Pascal, Nicole and Malebranche, with their mystical enthusiasm; Leibniz, with his monads and his rationalism; then all of that dogmatic, dreamy, aesthetic, skeptical, and especially eclectic Germany.
If Franz, reaching out his hand toward one of the shelves of his bookcase, chanced to want to escape from the phraseology of Kant, the exclusive self of Fichte, the absolute idealism of Scheling, the obscurity of Hegel, the epicureanism of Wieland, the German Voltaire, the theosophical mysticism of Jacques Boehm and his divine revelations, he could only find, to distract him from all those enthusiastic idealists and stubborn logicians, works scarcely calculated to remind him that he was scarcely 25 years old.
His grandfather, who had died only a few years before his father, had only compressed his dear philosophers to make a little space, between Goethe and Schiller, amid that ideal and several German literature which forms a transition between the literature of the Orient and that of the North, for a few Medieval poems, certain strange tales, such as the Niebelungenlied, the Tales of the Monk of Saint-Gall,22 the Story of Faust23 and a few novels by Ludwig Tieck—Journey into the Blue Distance,24 for example—and all the books on chiromancy he had been able to find.
So Franz, driven by his nature to reverie and the love of the unknown, only breathing an atmosphere ten centuries old, in the midst of a heart-rending silence, lived like his silent companions, retreating within himself in confrontation with his ideas, his dreams, his hesitations, knowing nothing, so to speak, of the external world or of reality.
Nothing would have been easier for him than to shake off the ancient world that surrounded him, to populate his house with young and joyful friends; but, as we have said, his character was fundamentally melancholy and lacking in initiative. The young men of his rank in Frankfurt would have received him with open arms, but it would have required him at least to go in search of them. That was a step of which he was incapable, and those young men fled the young dotard who only wanted dreamers for friends and science for a mistress. So Franz lived alone, limiting his relationships to a few of his grandfather’s friends, authentic old men, who gave scarcely any thought to his rejuvenation.
We left the Baron von Heberghem at the moment when his servant had told him that it was after midnight.
Franz tried to come back down to Earth on hearing his valet’s voice. He rubbed his eyes, stretched his arms, yawned a couple of times and, releasing a sigh, got to his feet in order to go to bed, with the submissiveness and nonchalance of a child.
By chance, his eyes fell momentarily on the Colloquia that he had placed, as we have said, on a little table next to his armchair. The cover that had seemed to him to be made of parchment, which he had carefully dusted before opening the book, seemed to him to be covered with dust again. He put out his hand to make sure of the fact, and for a moment, could not make sense of what was before his eyes. He was not in doubt for long, though. The parchment of the cover, which he had seen as the most beautiful pale yellow, with no other marks than those produced by tiny natural asperities, was illustrated with strange letters.
He thought he was dreaming and, to the amazement of his servant, let himself fall back into his armchair without his gaze quitting the hieroglyphic characters before his eyes. Franz was more of a dreamer than a savant, but he immediately recognized that the letters did not belong to any European language, nor to Arabic or Sanskrit, with which he had some familiarity. For a good hour, he searched his memory, turning the books this way and that, examining the bizarre parchment from every angle, but none of the symbols it bore were familiar to him. For the most part, they were little straight lines, interlaced with one another, bearing some resemblance to cuneiform script.
Not succeeding in classifying these bizarre letters, he began to ask himself how he had not seen them earlier—or, rather, how they had suddenly appeared, for he was convinced that an hour earlier, the cover of the Erasmus had been quite bare. Curiosity and his natural inclination spurring him on, he launched himself forth into the realm of hypotheses. The little incident was doubly fortunate, in that he had not sought it out. He let his head fall into his hands and racked his brains trying to find the key to the enigma.
Suddenly, the heat of the fire—which was reddening his fingers, as white and slender as a young woman’s—helped him glimpse the truth. Without paying any heed to the dolorously astonished gaze of Schmidt, who though he was mad, he held the cover of the Erasmus toward the flames. After a few seconds’ delay, he uttered a cry of joy. When heated, the characters traced on the parchment stood out more clearly, the slightest strokes becoming evident. There was no more doubt; what had been written there had been done with the aid of a sympathetic ink, and it was in leaning toward the fire in order to read that, without intending to, he had drawn the characters out of oblivion.
“Eureka!” he cried, exactly like Archimedes, turning to his manservant, who was on the point of calling for help. “Yes, but what does it mean?”
Again, one by one, he considered the symbols that were grimacing on the parchment as if they were mocking the efforts of his intelligence.
“Come on, come on,” he said, after a few moments of futile research. “Since Octavius is dead, Master Wolfram alone can extract me from this embarrassment; let’s run to him. Schmidt—my coat and hat!”
“The Baron is going out?” asked the old servant, taking a step backwards, as if to strike a defensive stance.
“Yes—be quick!”
“But sir, it’s after 1 a.m. and it’s snowing heavily.”
“I don’t care—my coat and hat.”
Schmidt obeyed, murmuring: “Oh, this will end badly, I know. Sir is always alone, and never amuses himself like other young people of his age. Day and night he works; he only likes books. For sure, misfortune has entered the house with this one. As if he hadn’t got enough of them in his library, and as if the Bible weren’t all that good Lutherans need to divert themselves.”
While his domestic was muttering, Franz, without listening, had put on his coat and, with the Colloquia under his arm, had gone rapidly down the main staircase of the house, shouting: “You can go to bed, Schmidt; don’t wait up for me—I might not be back until daylight.”
“Divine bounty!” exclaimed poor Schmidt, on hearing these words and listening to the heavy door to the street close noisily behind his master. “Divine bounty! Until daylight! In such weather! And why? I
f he were at least to follow the example of his honored father, the Baron, who so often said to me: ‘Go to bed, my good Schmidt; I’ll be spending the night elsewhere.’ But no, the poor young man! The prettiest girls in Frankfurt only know him by the color of his eyes.”
The old German had pronounced these last words while respectfully lighting his pipe at the fireplace in Franz’s bedroom, and he let himself fall in despair into the armchair that the latter had just quit.
Soon, a sonorous snoring replaced the energetic aspirations of the smoker, who had passed, without being aware of it, from one of his two favorite occupations to the other.
In the meantime, without worrying about the north wind that was whipping the snow into his face, Franz took the road to the old town at a run. If one of his rare friends had encountered him at such an hour, he would certainly have supposed that he had had a stroke of luck or had lost his mind, so strange was his gait.
The streets were deserted; on the thick layer of snow that carpeted them, his footsteps made no sound; the silence was gloomy. From time to time, in the distance, the echoes only sent back the cries of the night-watchmen, and brought back the silvery tinkle of the bells of a sleigh that went like a phantom along the road, on either side of which the large white houses of the new town loomed up, enveloped in their winter shrouds. Soon, the streets became narrower, more tortuous and darker, the sheets of snow thicker, smoother and less immaculate. The houses shrank, as if, doubting the strength of their old age, they wanted to support themselves on one another.
Franz was obliged to slow down. He was in the old town; the obscurity was such that he could no longer advance save, so to speak, by groping his way, and the same sensation of weight that he had already experienced in carrying the mysterious book for an entire afternoon, when he had been constrained to pass it from one hand to the other several times.
He eventually stopped in front of a little low door, abundantly studded with large iron nails—a door perfectly in harmony with the barred windows of the house it sealed. It was there that Master Wolfram dwelt, a scientist known throughout Germany and one of the old friends of the young Baron von Heberghem’s philosopher grandfather.
The World Above The World Page 8
