Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard (27 page)
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Authors: Isak Dinesen
Princess Ludmilla was exceedingly happy at Schloss Rosenbad.
She was delighted to be out of bed, in the open air and country and in the company of people with whom she could speak openly. She felt affectionately towards each member of her small court.
Herr Cazotte, in the center of it, by now was an old friend. He played the piano to her French and Italian songs; entertained her with gossip and anecdotes; when she had no appetite he concocted with his own hands marvelous cosmopolitan dishes; and from his visits to town brought back fine old lace for the dainty princely cradle.
Countess Poggendorff, the
Oberhofmeisterin
, encompassed her young mistress with graceful attention. From the coquettish lace cap on her head to the tip of her dainty shoe, the tiniest lady’s shoe in Babenhausen and a bit smaller than her foot, she was an emotionalist, and impressionable like a girl of fifteen. Once again within romantic surroundings and in an atmosphere of passion and danger she saw her own youth revived, charmed everybody and radiated a
languissant
benevolence on the household.
And as far as Princess Ludmilla’s relations with her new young maid-of-honor were concerned, the Princess, heavy with the sweetness of life, like a bee on its way home to the hive, was unable to see in her companion anything less than a sister. When the two girls slowly made the round of the
rose garden, Ludmilla, who was the younger and smaller, would lean on Ehrengard’s shoulder, but how infinitely wiser and more experienced, how much the elder sister did she not feel the while. At times she was almost afraid to display her immense superiority, she would then become more tender in her manner and would only reveal her advantage in a kind of tender raillery.
She was intrigued by Ehrengard’s lonely life at the Schreckenstein castle, asked her questions about her five tall brothers, whom she had seen at court, and shuddered at the description of the blizzards in the mountains and the ghosts in the old gray block of stones. She was keen to learn about her friend’s handsome young fiancé and his courtship. Ehrengard, in order to supply the information expected from her, had to think a good deal more about Kurt von Blittersdorff than till now she had ever done. Kurt, she informed the Princess, had fought several duels.
“But were you not terrified then, beside yourself with fear and grief?” Ludmilla asked.
“Kurt is a very good swordsman,” Ehrengard replied. “He has taught me to fence too.”
“Have you kissed him, Ehrengard?” Ludmilla enquired after one of her long pauses.
“Yes, I have kissed him many times when we were children,” said Ehrengard. “He is my cousin. While he was at school he used to stay at Schreckenstein during his holidays.”
After another pause Ludmilla asked: “Have you two ever had a secret together?”
“Yes,” Ehrengard again answered. “When the boys had done something bad, and I helped them to keep it from Papa.”
The Princess was silent, then suddenly exclaimed in a low voice: “Try to have a secret with him. Something that, in the
whole world, only you and he know of. You will be feeling, then, that he is you and you are he.”
Herr Cazotte wrote:
Ehrengard—like, I believe, most people of severely moral milieus—is not aware that she has learned any principles, and indeed does not know the meaning of the word principle. Her moral code she takes to be a codex of laws of nature, the which you need not explain or uphold since they will explain and uphold themselves
.
She is a country-bred girl, and familiar with the facts of life. She knows at what date after the wedding a child should be born. With servant girls of Schreckenstein irregularities have occurred, she has watched the abhorrence and wrath in faces of old housekeepers and governesses, and to her, then, as by the very law of gravitation, the girl in question has been a fallen woman. But inasmuch as the one fundamental law of her own nature is the loyalty of the house of Schreckenstein to the house of Fugger-Babenhausen, in present circumstances the reversion of the rule is legal and logical. A moral volte-face of this kind might be difficult to an old trained casuist, but a young girl will accomplish it with a high hand
.
The paradox of our relationship is therefore this: that while I am making her drink in by eye, ear, and nostril and by every pore of her clear skin the sweet poison of the Venusberg, it is I who am, in reality, teaching her and impressing upon her the nature and the necessity of moral principle. When she has fully appropriated the nature of principles and the necessity to herself of principles, then I am victorious, then the moment of my triumph has come
.
In the meantime I am enjoying every mien and movement of my youthful victim. It has taken five hundred years of isolation, discipline, and consciousness of absolute power, and of total abstinence from and ignorance of the arts, to make these. A wild animal, when it believes itself unobserved, moves and gazes about in that same way
.
Diana once walked through the woods of Arcady like that. At the same time she is, as the Grand Duchess pronounced
, gauche.
Of an evening, while the Princess rested on her sofa, Prince Lothar would play chess with Ehrengard. To him the chessboard was a deeply fascinating symbol of life and worthy of his entire attention. Ehrengard had been taught the game by General von Schreckenstein who, by now cut off from actual military exertion, still liked to practice his strategic skill and to operate with cavalry, artillery and infantry.
Herr Cazotte wrote:
In many ways—although without possessing his talents or his sentiment—she is so much like the Prince that the two might well be brother and sister. When I spoke to the Grand Duchess of plastic unity of being, I might have been discussing the maid-of-honor. Both are strikingly straight and well-balanced. But while the balance of my young lord is heaven-aspiring, like that of a young tree striving towards zenith, the girl is balanced to perfection in the manner of those little toy figures with lead at the base of them, which cannot be overturned
.
Prince Lothar was an eager horseman as well, and in the beginning of May, when to all sides and in every way the
landscape was getting lovelier, he invited his wife’s maid-of-honor to accompany him on his rides. At times Herr Cazotte would join them.
Herr Cazotte wrote:
Ehrengard has found the horses of our Rosenbad stables too sedate for her taste, and has asked to have her own mount brought from Schreckenstein. It is a fine and fiery black horse named Wotan, hard for anybody to manage but its young mistress herself When those two lead the way, we are all making light of hurdles or ditches. My Lord Lothar admires Ehrengard as a fearless horsewoman. I myself wonder whether the reckless rides be not unconscious attempts at escape. She is getting uneasy in the heavily-scented air of Rosenbad and begins to find it difficult to draw her breath in it. Her whole vigorous youthful constitution cries out for strong exercise. My gallant Ehrengard! You would never consent to run away from a danger. Set your mind at rest, from your present danger you cannot run away
.
On the eighth of May a little Prince was born at Schloss Rosenbad.
As the first shrill, preternatural cry rang from the Princess’ room round which the household had been listening, the chateau trembled and was changed from cellar to attics. A sigh of happy relief ran through all rooms. But in the very next instant the silence became infinitely deeper and more momentous. Who would have the heart to betray the tiny defenseless newcomer? Death to each inhabitant of the house would be preferable.
A lovelier child had never seen the light of day in Babenhausen. Professor Putziger himself was surprised at the faultlessness
of the infant and put on an additional pair of glasses to examine it. The trusted midwife, who had once helped Prince Lothar into the world, was bound to admit that the son outshone the father. Countess Poggendorff cooed before the cradle:
“L’on se sent plus belle devant une telle beauté! L’on se sent plus innocente devant une telle innocence!”
From the silky topknot to the rosy toenails the baby was perfection.
A courier was at once dispatched to the Grand Duchess. The poor lady, for fear of publicity, had not dared to break off her stay with the Grand Duke at their usual watering place. She had passed the last weeks in a state of great nervous excitement by the side of her unsuspecting husband. Her sudden outburst of tears at the apparently insignificant tidings from Rosenbad, as a sign of unwonted weakness in his consort, made the Grand Duke resolve to prolong their sojourn at the bath.
A new figure, of great importance in the household as well as in this story, now made her appearance in the Rosenbad circle. Her name was Lispeth. Magnificently dressed in the costume of the province, with embroidered cambric and long silk ribbons, she was a pleasant sight, big and buxom, pink and white, with a round, gentle and genial face. She was the daughter and granddaughter of faithful gamekeepers to the Grand Ducal house, and already some time ago had been picked out by the Grand Duchess and Professor Putziger, with the utmost regard to physical and moral qualities, as nurse to its small hope.
The young mother, in the satin and lace of her four-poster, at the first sight of the young peasant woman had shed a few tears of jealousy. But she was soon won over to see her rival as a kind of second self, stronger and wiser and with more knowledge of life, for Lispeth had got two children beside the baby which she had left in order to give her warm bosom
and heart to the little Prince, an arbiter and oracle in all vital matters. Her privileged position was acknowledged in the house, Countess Poggendorff and Herr Cazotte took trouble to ingratiate themselves with the country woman who spoke the strong dialect of the province.
The problem of the baby’s christening had now to be settled. The great ceremony within the cathedral of Babenhausen would be taking place towards the end of July. How then were things to be managed during the interval of ten weeks? To have a child christened twice is blasphemy. Yet could his devotees consent to expose their precious charge to any bodily or spiritual risks by leaving him unbaptized for that length of time? Lispeth took her place on the council as an expert on changelings and oafs. Steel, she declared, must always be kept in the cradle, rats or mice must not be mentioned, yarn must not be wound, and by no means must the name of the Devil be as much as whispered inside the walls of the chateau. Herr Cazotte, himself being a son of the people, enjoined all these precautionary measures.
Herr Cazotte wrote:
Ehrengard undoubtedly for the first time in her life and without knowing it herself as altogether she knows very little about herself has fallen in love. It will serve my purpose. To fall in love with the God of Love himself may well be, to a mind of her energy and collectedness, the first step towards a deeper, final fall. The guileless figure of Cupid, the embodiment of love, himself ignorant of and immune to the passion, is the most fatal of dolls. I have sometimes wondered at seeing mothers placidly encouraging their small daughters to play with dolls. A little girl is a deep creature and may by instinct know more about the
facts of life than the elderly maiden governess who teaches her her ABC’s. And while the Mama is looking to the future and reasoning that to her daughter the moment of supreme sacrifice will be lying a full fifteen years ahead, the daughter with her delicate roots in the dark mould of the past will be aware of that supreme moment of her existence, lying only five or six years back
.
My young lady of Schreckenstein till now has taken no interest in infants. She has, she tells me, got nephews, but she has seen little of them and does, I understand, view them mainly as generals-to-be. The pathetic gracefulness of a baby to her is a new and surprising phenomenon. She does not smile and sigh over the little Prince as does our sweet Madame Poggendorff, she stands up straight by the cradle side, lost in contemplation. Once, as his nurse held him up, I saw her slowly raising his hand to her lips and passing the small fingers over them one by one, thoughtfully, as if a little alarmed by the softness and smoothness of the skin
.
Am I jealous? By no means. I take it as a pretty compliment on the part of the God of Love that he should call, in the flesh, on his devoted priest
.
Now that the maid-of-honor was partly relieved of her duty as companion to her mistress, she did not always know what to do with herself at Rosenbad and welcomed Herr Cazotte’s conversation. It even became obvious to the small court that she preferred his company to that of others and would look round for him if she did not find him in the room or on the terrace.
The great artist was gentle and courteous, if a little impersonal, in his manner with the highborn maiden. From his rich treasury of knowledge he took out for her benefit strange
tales of ancient times, theories of art and life and fancies of his own on the phenomena of existence. He entertained her, too, with narrations of his own eventful life, dwelling on the days when he was a poor boy in shabby clothes, or slightly touching on his triumphs at academies and courts, and sprinkling his talk with accounts of the life of outcasts in dark streets or with bits of scandal from sublime places.
He found that the girl had read little and lent her books from his exclusive library or read out to her in the shade of the big trees. Poetry, new to her, puzzled and fascinated her. Herr Cazotte had a voice made for reciting poetry and had often been asked to read by princesses and
beaux-esprits
. At times he would lower the book with a finger in it and go on reciting with his eyes in the tree crowns.
On a very lovely evening he had been reading to her in the garden and was slowly accompanying her back to the house, when he stopped and made her stop with him by a fountain representing Leda and the swan and repeated a stanza from the poem they had last read together. He was silent for a while, the girl was silent with him, and as he turned toward her he found her young face very still.