Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard (28 page)
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Authors: Isak Dinesen
“A penny for your thoughts, my Lady Ehrengard,” he said.
She looked at him, and for a moment a very slight blush slid over her face.
“I was not,” after a pause she answered him slowly and gravely, “really thinking of anything at all.”
He had no doubt that here, as ever, she was speaking the truth.
Herr Cazotte wrote:
You smile, dear friend, at my complaints that Ehrengard occupies my mind too much and is monopolizing it to such
an extent that I am in sheer self-preservation longing for the moment when I shall have done with her and be free to take up other interests in life. And although you be the glass of matronly virtue to all Babenhausen, you will be asking in your heart: “Why does not the silly fool seduce the girl in the orthodox and old-fashioned manner and set his mind at rest?” My answer to your question is: “Madame, the silly fool is an artist.”
He is at this moment an artist absorbed in and intoxicated by the creation of his chef d’oeuvre. Food and rest are nothing to him, he is fed by winged inspiration as the Prophet Elijah was fed by his ravens. Allow me to let you participate in the working of an artist’s mind
.
I insist on obtaining a full surrender without any physical touch whatever. I kiss the hands of our married ladies and have respectfully placed a kiss or two on Mistress Lispeth’s broad brown hand, while I have hardly brushed with my own Ehrengard’s slender, strong fingers. But how resolutely do not the hands of my mind caress every part of hers, how insistingly run over the inmost strings of her being, tuning them to wheel from them their deepest sounds and vibrations
.
I might, upon your friendly advice, undertake to seduce the girl in the orthodox and old-fashioned manner, and the task might not be as difficult as it looks. All marble she is not; were she so, she would not interest me. She has within her fire enough for an artillery charge and warmth enough for a cow house, the Schreckensteins having been, for five hundred years, both
condottieri
and cattlemen. I might seduce her, for she is impulsive and unreflecting, in a particularly impetuous moment of hers. And, Madame, it would mean nothing
.
For her ruin, in such a case, would be a fact and a reality. And she knows about facts and realities—as the
daughter of a long line of men of action she very likely knows more about them than your humble servant. She might, in such a case, save herself by some real and actual measure. She might well, in one single, deadly collected movement, renounce the world and retire to desiccate, a dumb, tall mummy on horseback, upon her mountain. Or she might seize upon the idea of revenge and rouse her brothers and her young fiancé to kill me, a very brutal end to an artistic enterprise
.
Set your mind at rest. She is safe within my hands and will be more thoroughly seduced than was ever any other maiden
.
Pious people tell us that our moments of earthly delight be but echoes of a former, heavenly existence. I believe them. It will be so with Ehrengard von Schreckenstein when I have accomplished my task. From the moment when, in deep gratitude, I have bared my head to her and left her, any touch of physical delight within her life to her will be but the echo of my celestial embrace
.
How will she, then, save herself? To the world I have never in the least compromised her, yet she will know herself to be ultimately and hopelessly compromised. The world did not grudge sweet Gretchen—the heroine of my gigantic namesake—her guilt, it admitted her crime of infanticide and her debt to the sword of justice. To that same world Ehrengard will still be on her pedestal, the snow-white virgin, and yet she will know herself just as clearly as Gretchen to be fallen, broken and lost. Will she not then, in her turn, in sheer self-preservation, be dependent on me as the one and only confirmer of her perdition, the unique guarantor of the loss, the blowing up of her virginity? Will she not for the rest of her life be dragging herself after me, wringing her hands, crying out my name incessantly, regularly
,
with the might of all the clocks of Babenhausen? Alas, Madame, she will not catch me up, for I shall be away painting other fair ladies, having handed her over, intact but annihilated, to the fond cares of a young husband who will never have the faintest notion that he is drinking up my remains
.
And will not then, you ask me, her ruin be a fact and a reality? Verily, my friend, it will be so, inasmuch as the reality of Art be superior to that of the material world. Inasmuch as the artist be, everywhere and at all times, the arbiter on reality
.
I have, on a trip to town, taken the trouble to look up our young guardsman. He is, by the way, shortly coming up to this neighborhood for the big maneuvers, but will naturally have no chance of recalling himself to his fiancée. I have found him to be all that I can desire for the role of a spiritual cuckold
.
My heart kisses your hand
.
Cazotte
P.S. Why should I not confide to you a fancy of mine which much occupied my thoughts at the time when I was a small lonely boy bewildered in existence, at the time before I met you? As you have been aware, I have never known the name of my father. Still, a father I will have had, and I thank him for contributing to giving me eyes, ears and a nose with which to enjoy the world. The little street Arab of Babenhausen took in, transported, the sights, sounds and smells round him. He was deeply in love with color and brilliancy and would follow the soldiers and the dashing officers in the streets, dwelling on the idea that one of these were his father. Now when in the early spring I visited the Schreckenstein castle this long-forgotten whim suddenly
came back to me: why should not that imposing figure, General Schreckenstein, be my papa? We are alike in many ways. I, too, have got small ears set close to the head, and I, too, am fearless by nature. The General as a young guardsman will have had his
amourettes
in garrison towns, and to seduce and abandon a housemaid to him will have seemed a matter of no consequence. Yet the order of the Universe is sublime, graceful and inexorable. Inside it nothing is without a consequence, but your first move on the board may in the end pronounce you mate. A thoughtless move on the first night of July—for I was born, as all through our acquaintance you have been kind enough to remember, on the first of April, a true and guaranteed fool—may snow you under, finally, in your gala uniform and decorations and your towering castle. Unwillingly the father initiates the son into the law that things have got consequences, that even a case of seduction will have them, and the initiated brother passes on the knowledge to his young sister
.
And what lofty spiritual heavenly court of justice will pass sentence on my case of lofty, spiritual, heavenly incest?
It was a kind of rite in the life of Herr Cazotte that he should pass the first night of July out-of-doors. Faithful to it, on that same night, shortly after the court and the household of Rosenbad had gone to bed, he walked out below pale stars in a pale sky, in a world dripping with dew and filled with fragrance. He first walked quickly to get away, then slowed down to gaze round him. As he did so his heart overflowed with gratitude. He took off his hat.
“What tremendous, unfathomable power of imagination,” he said to himself, “has formed each of the smallest details
here, and combined them into a mighty unity. I am no modest person, I think pretty highly of my own talents, and I venture to believe that I might have imagined one or the other of the things that surround me. I might have invented the long grass—but could I have invented the dew? I might have invented the dusk, but could I have invented the stars? I know,” he said to himself as he stood quite still and listened, “that I could not have invented the nightingale.
“The blossoms of the chestnut tree,” he went on, “hold themselves up straight like altar candles. The blossoms of the lilac seem to be rushing in all directions from the stem and the branches, making of the whole bush an exuberant bouquet, the flowers of the laburnum drop like golden summer icicles in the pale blue air. But the blossoms of the hawthorn lie along the branches like light layers of white and rosy snow. Such infinite variance cannot possibly be necessitated by the economy of Nature, it will needs be the manifestation of a universal spirit—inventive, buoyant and frolicsome to excess, incapable of holding back its playful torrents of bliss. Indeed, indeed:
Domine, non sum dignus
.”
He strolled for a long time through the woods. “I am tonight,” he thought, “paying my respects to the great god Pan.”
The summer night lightened round him, the colors began to come out, tardily, as if reluctantly, in the grass and the trees. The wanderer’s trouser legs were soaked high above his knees and set with burrs and thorns. In his pocket he had a round of bread and a slice of cheese, and he now sat down on the grassy slope of a small clear mountain brook to eat it, washing it down with ice-cold water from a small tin cup. Herr Cazotte, as far as food and drink went, was an ascetic. In his very young days he had been so from necessity, later, although he could value meat and wine to a nicety, by inclination,
today he was keeping up the habit in order to preserve his figure. His simple meal finished, he leaned his back to a willow tree, and for a long time sat immovable, from the depth of his heart applauding the universe.
“And even little Johann Wolfgang Cazotte,” he thought, “has been fitted in very prettily and is indeed at the moment indispensable to the mightly whole. As what?” After a pause he answered himself: “As a small, innocent and happy, wet and dirty satyr in the big dark woods.”
He got up and started walking back. He had promised to assist Princess Ludmilla with the program for a little musical soiree, a surprise for Prince Lothar upon the anniversary of their first meeting. He was a punctual person, and as he walked he looked at his watch; he had plenty of time.
His path ran along the mountain lake. From time to time he stopped to let his eyes caress the landscape and his nose draw in the pure air. His walk would soon be over, and he would once more from the melodious solitude of the wood and the slope be back in the company of human beings who did not always understand him. He had sharp ears, and now he heard voices not far off, low, clear women’s voices. He left the path and made his way through the shubbery to get a view of the speakers.
Now, twenty feet away, somewhat below him where the lake narrowed and ended up, a couple of stone steps had been built into the green slope; here one could land a boat. Upon the steps were two female figures, in whom after a minute he recognized Ehrengard and her maid. Ehrengard was undressing, and the maid picking up and folding her garments. Just as he looked at her she let her shift drop to the ground and stood for a moment all naked, very quiet, gazing round.
Above the water sheet the haze was lifting like delicate layers of veils being withdrawn one by one. In the light of
the coming sunrise it was roseate and opalescent, less white than the girl’s body, the thin streamers clinging to her foot and knee like a lastly-shed, cobwebby garment. She stepped forth amid it, slender, strong, her head raised, her long tresses gathered together above it in a crescent. The maid collected her clothes and retired with them to the grass. The young girl seemed to be the only human being between the clear water and the clear sky. The trees and rushes were all her friends and playmates, unobserved like herself. She hesitated for a moment with one slim foot in the water, then went in, gently breaking its surface as she let it rise to her knee, bosom and shoulders. A little way out she stopped and lifted her arms to bind her hair tighter, as she got in deeper she filled her hands to bathe her face. She lingered in the water, moving slowly, a water nymph happily back in her element.
After a while she again ascended from the embrace of the lake. Her perfect solitude was broken as her maid came out from the bushes to wrap a big towel round her and, lowly chattering and chuckling, to rub her dry. Together they disappeared from view behind the shrub, their voices were still heard for a moment or two, then everything was silent once more, they had gone away.
Herr Cazotte became very grave. While watching the vision before him he had thought of nothing at all, his soul had been in his eyes. As now, slowly, he let notions and ideas come back to him, he realized that here he had been, as never before, elected and favored, overwhelmed with grace.
A unique motif had been granted to a great artist, that was one thing. He had proved himself to be right, and more than right, in his valuation of the girl’s beauty, that was another.
But the generosity of the Gods was more alarming and astounding still.
For their gift to him was a direct and personal nature, the immortal powers had consented to cooperate with him in the purpose which had so long held him. Frolicsome they were, hilarious and magnanimous to excess. And dangerous, dangerous for a mortal, even for an artist, to associate with. He became still graver.
She would come back, of that he was certain. The Gods would not cheat him. Probably her early morning bathing in the lake was a recurrent event and a daily observance, which she was keeping secret to all the world with the exception of her maid.
The picture which he had here been ordered to paint—“Nymph bathing in a forest lake,” or “The bath of Diana”—would be in itself a wonder and a glory, the crowning of his career as an artist. But more wonderful and glorious still would be the moment in which he was to set it before the eyes of its model.
In what possible way could he more fully and thoroughly make the girl his own than by capturing, fastening and fixing upon his canvas every line and hue of her young body, her complete, carefully hidden beauty, going over it, patting and dubbing every item of it with his. brush, re-creating and immortalizing it, so that nobody in the world could ever again separate the two of them. It would be, unmistakably and for all eternity, Ehrengard, the maid from the mountains, and it would be, unmistakably and for all eternity, a Cazotte.