Delphi collected works o.., p.172
Delphi Collected Works of E. T. A. Hoffmann (Illustrated), page 172
“Michael Popowicz! Michael Popowicz! Do you not see the fireman?”
The old man murmured to himself. He seemed to be praying. But suddenly he cried out, “Agafia!” And at that moment his face glowed in blood-red fire which seemed to be shooting up at him out of the Elbe. On the Meissner Hills great fluttering flames blazed up into the sky; their reflection shone into the river, and upon the old man’s face. And now, close beside me upon the bridge, there began to be audible a sort of plashing and splashing, and I saw a dim form climbing up arduously, and presently swing itself over the balustrade with marvellous dexterity.
“Agafia?” the old man cried.
“Girl! Dorothea! In the name of heaven,” I was beginning, but in an instant I felt myself clasped hold of, and forcibly drawn away. “Oh, for Christ’s sake keep silence, dearest Anselmus, or you are a dead man,” whispered the creature who was standing close to me, trembling and shivering with cold. Her long black hair hung down dripping, her sodden garments were clinging to her slender body. She sank down exhausted, saying, in tones of gentle complaining, “Oh, it is so cold down there! Do not say another word, Anselmus dearest, or we must certainly die.”
The light of the flames was glowing upon her face, and I saw that she was Dorothea, the pretty country girl who had taken asylum with my landlord when her native village was plundered, and her father killed. He employed her as a servant, and used to say that her troubles had quite stupefied her, or otherwise she would have been a nice enough little thing. And he was right there. She scarcely spoke, except to utter a few words which sounded like incoherent nonsense, whilst her face, which would otherwise have been beautiful, was marred by a strange unmeaning smile. She used to bring my coffee into my room every morning, and I remarked that her figure, complexion, &c., were not at all those of a peasant girl. “Ah,” my landlord used to say, “you see she’s a farmer’s daughter, and a Saxon.”
As this girl was thus lying, rather than kneeling before me, half dead, dripping, I quickly pulled off my cloak and wrapped her in it, whispering to her, “Warm yourself, dear, oh, warm yourself, darling Dorothea, or you will die! What were you doing in the cold river?”
“Oh, keep silent!” she said, throwing back the hood of her mantle, and combing her dripping hair back with her fingers. “What I implore you to do is to keep silent. Come to that stone seat yonder. Father is speaking with Saint Andrew, and can’t hear us.”
We crept cautiously to the stone seat. Utterly carried away by the most extraordinary sensations, overmastered by fear and rapture, I clasped the creature in my arms. She sat down in my lap without hesitation, and threw her arms about my neck. I felt the icy water from her hair running down my neck; but as drops sprinkled on fire only increase its flaming, love and longing only seethed up within me the more vehemently.
“Anselmus,” she whispered, “I believe you are good and true. When you sing it goes right through my heart, and you have charming ways. You won’t betray me. Who would get you your coffee if you did? And, listen, when you are all starving (and you soon will be), I’ll come to you at night, all alone, when nobody can know, and bake you nice cakes. I have flour, fine flour, hidden away in my little room. And we’ll have bridecake, white and lovely!” At this she began to laugh, but immediately sobbed and wept. “Ah me! like those in Moskow. Oh! my Alexei! my Alexei! Beautiful dolphin, swim! Swim through the waves! Am I not waiting for you, your faithful love?” She drooped her little head, her sobs grew fainter, and she seemed to sink into a slumber, her bosom heaving and falling in sighs of longing. I looked at the old man. He was standing with outstretched arms, and saying, in hollow tones, “He gives the signal! See how he shakes his fiery locks of flame; how eagerly he treads into the ground those fiery pillars on which he traverses the land! Hear ye not his step of thunder? Feel ye not the vivifying breath which wreathes before him like a gleaming incense cloud? Hither! hither! mighty brethren!”
The sound of the old man’s words was like the hollow roar of the approaching whirlwind, and while he spoke, the fire upon the Meissner Hills blazed brighter and brighter. “Help, Saint Andrew!” the girl cried in her sleep. And suddenly she sprung up as if possessed by some terrible idea, and throwing her left arm more closely round me, whispered into my ear, “Anselmus! it would be better that I killed you,” and I saw a knife gleaming in her right hand. I repulsed her in terror, with a loud cry of, “Mad creature! What would you do?” Then she screamed out, “Ah, I cannot do it! But all is over with you now!” At that moment the old man cried, “Agafia, with whom are you speaking?” And ere I could bethink me, he was close to me, aiming a stroke with his swung staff at me which would have cleft my skull in two had not Agafia seized me from behind and drawn me quickly away. The staff splintered into a thousand pieces on the stone bench. The old man fell on his knees. “Allons! allons!” resounded from all sides. I had to collect my thoughts, and spring quickly to one side to avoid being crushed by the guns and ammunition waggons which were again coming across.
Next morning the Russians drove this expeditionary force down from the hills, and back into the fortifications, notwithstanding the superiority of its numbers. “’Tis a strange thing,” people said, “that our friends outside were informed of the enemy’s plans, for that signal fire on the Meissner Hills had the effect of assembling the troops, so that they might make a resistance in force, just at the very time and place where he intended to concentrate his attacking bodies.”
For several days Dorothea did not come in the morning with my coffee; and my landlord, pale with terror, told me had seen her, along with the mad beggar of the Elbe bridge, marched off from the marshal’s quarters to Neustadt under a strong escort.
“Oh, good heavens!” said Anselmus’s friend, “they were discovered and executed.”
But Anselmus gave a strange smile and said, “Agafia got away; and, alter the Peace was signed, I received, from her own hands, a beautiful white wedding-cake of her own making.”
The reticence of Anselmus was proof against every effort to induce him to say anything more concerning this astonishing affair.
When Cyprian had finished, Lothair said, “You told us that the events which suggested this sketch would be more interesting than it is itself; so that I consider those suggesting circumstances are an essential part of it, without which it is not complete. Therefore, I think you ought at once to give us your why and wherefore, as a sort of explanatory note.”
“Does it not seem to you to be as unusual as remarkable,” said Cyprian, “that all that I have read to you is literally true, and that even the little ‘wind up,’ has its kernel of actuality?”
“Let us hear!” the friends cried.
“To begin with,” said Cyprian, “I must tell you that the fate which befell Anselmus in my sketch was actually my own, as well. My being ten minutes late decided my destiny, so that I was shut up in Dresden just as it was surrounded on all sides. It is a fact that after the battle of Leipzig, when our condition became more painful and trying day by day, certain friends, or mere acquaintances, whom a similar lot and a like way of thinking had drawn together, used to assemble in the back room of a coffee-house, much as the disciples did at Emmaus. The landlord, one Eichelkraut, was a reliable, trustworthy man, who made no secret of his hostility to the French, and always obliged them to treat him with proper respect and keep their due distance from him when they came in as customers. No Frenchman was allowed to make his way into that backroom on any pretext, and if one did succeed in showing his nose there, he could never get a morsel to eat, or a drop to drink, let him implore, or swear, as much as he liked. Moreover, the room was always as silent as the grave, and we all blew such stifling clouds out of our pipes that the place soon became so full of the exhalation that a Frenchman would be very soon smoked out, like a wasp, and usually went growling and swearing out of the door like one. As soon as he did, the window would be opened to let the reek out, and we would be restored to our peace and comfort again. The life and soul of those meetings was a well-known talented and charming writer: and I remember with great pleasure how he and I used to get upstairs to the upper story of the house, look out of the little garret window into the night, and see the enemy’s bivouac fires shining in the sky. We used to say to each other all sorts of wonderful things which the shimmer of those fires, combined with the moonlight, used to put into our heads, and then go down and tell our friends what we imagined we had seen. It is a fact that one night one of our number (an advocate) who was always the first to hear any news, and whose reports were always reliable (heaven knows whence he derived his information), came in and told us the decision which had just been come to by the council of war concerning the expedition of Count von der Lobau, exactly as I have repeated it to you. It is likewise true that as I was going home about midnight, while the French battalions were falling-in in profound silence (no generale being beaten) and beginning their march over the bridge, I met ammunition waggons, so that I could have no doubt of the accuracy of his information. And lastly, it is the fact that, on the bridge, there was a grey old beggar lying, begging from the French troops as they crossed, whom I could not remember having seen in Dresden before. Last of all it is the fact, and the most wonderful of all, that when, much interested and excited, I reached my own quarters, on climbing up to the top story I did see a fire on the Meissner Hills, which was neither a watch fire nor a burning building. The sequel showed that the Russians must have known that night all about the attack intended to be made on the following morning, inasmuch as they concentrated troops which had been at a considerable distance upon the Meissner Hills, and it was principally Russian Landwehr which drove the French back as a storm sweeps a field of stubble. When the remnant of them fell back into the fortifications, the Russians quietly marched off to their previous positions. So that at the very time when the council of war was held at Gouvion de St. Cyr’s, the decision which it arrived at was communicated to, or, more probably, overheard by persons who were not supposed to have this in their power. Strangely enough, the advocate knew every detail of the deliberation; for instance, that Gouvion was opposed to the expedition, and only yielded lest he might be thought wanting in courage, in a case where rapidity of decision was a desideratum. Count von der Lobau was determined to march out and endeavour to cut his way to the emperor’s army. But how did the surrounding force know so soon of what was projected? For they knew of it in the course of an hour. Not only was it apparently impossible to get across the strongly fortified bridge; and if not, the river would have had to be swum, and the various trenches and walls got over. Moreover, the whole of Dresden was palisaded, and carefully guarded by sentries, to a considerable distance round. Where was the possibility of any human being surmounting all those obstacles in such a short space of time! One might think of telegraphic signals, made by means of lights from some tall tower or loftily situated house. But consider the difficulty of carrying that out, and the risk of detection, for such signals would have been easily seen. At all events it remains an incomprehensible thing how what actually happened came to pass; and that is enough to suggest to a lively imagination all sorts of mysterious and sufficiently extraordinary hypotheses to account for it.”
“I bow my knee in deep reverence before Saint Serapion,” said Lothair; “and before the most worthy of his disciples, and I am quite sure that a Serapiontic account of the important incidents of the war, as seen by him, if given in his characteristic style, would be exceedingly interesting, as well as very instructive, to imaginative members of the profession of arms. At the same time I have little doubt that the incidents in question came about quite naturally, and in the ordinary course of events. But you had to get your landlord’s servant-girl, the pleasing Dorothea, into the water, as a sort of deluding Nixie; and she — —”
“Don’t jest about that,” Cyprian said, very solemnly. “Don’t make jokes on that subject, Lothair. At this moment I see that beautiful creature before my eyes, that lovely terrible mystery (I do not know what other name to call her by). It was I who had that bridecake sent to me; glittering in diamonds, flashing like lightning, wrapped in priceless sables — —”
“Listen,” cried Vincenz. “We are getting at it now. The Saxon maid-servant — the Russian Princess — Moskow — Dresden — Has not Cyprian always spoken in the most mysterious language, and with the most recondite allusions, of a certain period of his life just after the first French war? It is coming out now! Speak! Let all your heart stream forth, my Cyprianic Serapion and Serpiontic Cyprian.”
“And how if I keep silence?” answered Cyprian, suddenly drawing in his horns, and growing grave and gloomy. “And how if I am obliged to keep silence? And I shall keep silence!”
He spoke those words in a strangely solemn and exalted tone, leaning back in his chair, and fixing his eyes on the ceiling, as was his wont when deeply moved.
The friends looked at one another with questioning glances.
“Well,” said Lothair at last, “it seems that somehow our meeting of to-night has fallen into a strange groove of ill-fortune, and it appears to be hopeless to expect any comfort or enjoyment out of it. Suppose we have a little music, and sing some absurd stuff or other as vilely as we can.”
“Yes,” said Theodore, “that is the thing.” And he opened the piano. “If we don’t manage a canon — which, according to Junker Tobias is a thing which can reel three souls out of a weaver’s body — we will make it awful enough to be worthy of Signor Capuzzi and his friends. Suppose we sing an Italian Terzetto buffo out of our own heads. I’ll be the prima donna, and begin. Ottmar will be the lover, and Lothair had better be the comic old man, and come in, raging and swearing in rapid notes.”
“But the words, the words,” said Ottmar.
“Sing whatever you please,” said Theodore; “Oh Dio! Addio! Lasciami mia Vita.”
“No, no,” cried Vincenz. “If you won’t let me take part in your singing — although I feel that I possess a wonderful talent for it, which only wants the voice of a Catalani to produce itself in the work-a-day world with drastic effect, allow me at least to be your librettist — your poet-laureate. And here I hand you your libretto at once.”
He had found on Theodore’s writing-table the ‘Indice de Teatrali Spettacoli’ for 1791, and this he handed to Theodore. This indice, like all which appear yearly in Italy, merely contained a list of the titles of the operas performed, with the names of their composers, and of the singers, scene-painters, &c., concerned in their production. They opened the page which related to the opera in Milan, and it was decided that the prima donna should sing the names of the lover-tenors (with a due interspersing of Ah Dio’s and Oh Cielo’s), that the lover-tenor should sing the names of the prima donnas in like manner, and that the comic old man should come in, in his furious wrath, with the titles of the operas which had been given and an occasional burst of invective, appropriate to his character.
Theodore played a ritornello of the cut and pattern which occurs by the hundred in the opera buffas of the Italians, and then began to sing in sweet, tender strains “Lorenzo Coleoni! Gaspare Rossari! Oh Dio! Giuseppo Marelli! Francesco Sedini!” &c. Ottmar followed with “Giuditta Paracca! Teresa Ravini! Giovanna Velata — Oh Dio!” &c. And Lothair burst duly in with rapid, angry quavers: “Le Gare Generose, del Maestro Paesiello — Che vedo? La Donna di Spirito, del Maestro Mariella. Briconaccio! Piro, Re di Epiro! Maledetti! — del Maestro Zingarelli,” &c.
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