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Alleged Account of Madame de S...y

[From Moritz Hartmann, "Eine Vermutung"(1852)]

Translated from the German by Scott J. Thompson. <Added 1/27/99>

. . . It was at the beginning of this century, about 50 years ago. I was living in this same house with my father and was a child either fourteen or fifteen years old. From our balcony one day I noticed a man who seemed to be wandering aimlessly upon the plain, often walking back and forth, yet without looking for anything or heading in any particular direction. He repeatedly came back to the same spot without realizing it. During a stroll that same afternoon I encountered him, but he walked past me, lost in thought, without seeing me, and when he stood in the path at a curve he looked into the distance with a resolute stare and an inexpressible longing. Had I happened upon any other occurrence like this at that time, I would have been quite terrified in my silly girlishness and run home to hide behind my father. This stranger, however, filled me with a kind of compassion which I found inexplicable. It was not the sympathy one feels for a poor, indigent person, even though he looked destitute enough, for his clothes were in terrible disarray, unwashed and even torn here and there. What filled my heart, my girlish heart, with compassion and sympathy was a certain noble expression of pain and at the same time an expression that looked as if his spirit were absent somewhere with loved ones in the far distance. In the evening I told my father about the stranger. He believed that it might well have been one of the many political prisoners or prisoners of war who were more or less allowed to live freely on their word of honor within the inner provinces of France.

The following day I saw the eccentric stranger wandering through the fields like the day before and finally entering our park, of all things, which was open to the street. He looked around in amazement and soon seemed to be pleased by his surroundings. At that time the large lawn in the middle, which you are familiar with, was not there. Instead there was a large water basin surrounded by a high balustrade upon which were perched a society of twenty-one large and small Greek gods, mostly copies of antique statues from the Sixteenth Century. The Neptune of Giovanni da Bologna stood upon a rock in the middle of the basin. When the stranger spied this society of gods he hurried over to it with great strides, overjoyed and full of the greatest enthusiasm. He raised his arms to the heavens as if praying, and from the window it seemed to us that he was actually declaiming to the accompaniment of his enthusiastic movement. Then he went around the basin from one statue to the next, always looking like the art expert or at least the connoisseur, and my father remarked that he had stood the longest by the most beautiful one. It was the greatest pleasure to me to eavesdrop on this play, and my father also seemed to be entertained. "C'est quelque original," he repeated numerous times as we observed the stranger.

I became very angry when my pleasure was interrupted by a garde champêtre. This man who had been given the charge of guarding my father's park barged in suddenly and pounced upon the stranger, informing him, as we could recognize by his gestures, that the park was private property and that he would have to move on. But the stranger smiled, turned his back to the guard and walked over to another statue. The guard followed him, assailing him with language which became more and more vehement the less the stranger paid attention to it. In his overzealous police manner, the man finally grabbed the stranger by the arms and forcibly tossed him out of the park. My father was an influential man in the department, a friend of the Prefect, and he could have become Prefect himself, hence the subordinate watchman's zeal to demonstrate his own conscientiousness to my father. But my father was not well-served by such crude overzealousness. The moment he saw the violence he hurried outside and I followed him. He reprimanded the man for such methods, sent him away, and told the stranger that he could look around the park at his leisure.

This man, who had hardly noticed the coarseness of the garde champêtre, turned at once to my father and said smiling, "The gods are no man's property, they belong to the world, and if they smile upon us we belong to them. Look at this Aglaia, how she smiles and captivates me; she does not smile on her owner alone."

"It is a Pomona," my father corrected.

"No, it is an Aglaia," rejoined the stranger with certainty, continuing at once, "The water here should be cleaner, like the water of Cephissus or the flood of Erechtheus upon the Acropolis. It is not fitting that the gods see themselves reflected in a dark mirror, but," he added with a sigh, "we are not in Greece."

"Are you a Greek, perhaps?" my father asked, half in earnest, half jest.

"No! On the contrary, I am a German!" sighed the stranger.

"On the contrary?" repeated my father, "Is the German the contrary of the Greek?"

"Yes," answered the German curtly, adding after a moment, "we all are! You, the French, are too; the Englishman, your enemy, is too - we all are!"

Turning to face my father he then said a lot of other things which I cannot remember. I would certainly not have beenable to remember so clearly what I have just told you had it not been repeated later in our household so often. From that time on whenever my father had someone clean the water basin, he was sure to add jokingly, "The water must be as clean as the water of Cephissus or the flood of Erechtheus upon the Acropolis." Nor did I understand everything the stranger said because he spoke a very bad French with a highly distorted accent, which made many words completely unrecognizable to me. My aunt who reared me came along, and I remember her big eyes at the stranger's talk when she whispered to my father, "He is a German, an original!"

But we all liked the Original very much. He was not handsome and looked prematurely aged, although he could not have been more than thirty years old; but he had glowing and yet gentle eyes, likewise a firm but mild mouth. One also recognized that his very lowly attire was in disproportion to his standing and education. I was so delighted when my father invited him to follow us into the house. He accepted the invitation without ceremony and went with us, talking all the while, and from time to time he would lay his hand upon my head, which both frightened and pleased me so. My father was plainly interested in the stranger and desired to continue listening to his eccentric speech, but he was really disappointed when we went into the salon. The stranger walked directly to the sofa and said, "I am tired," mumbled a few more incomprehensible words, stretched out, shut his eyes and fell asleep at once.

We stood there and looked in astonishment at one another. "He's crazy," whispered my aunt, but my father shook his head and said, "He's an original, I like him, he's a German."

Papa sent the servant back with the wine he had ordered and we left the salon, leaving the stranger alone to his rest,forhe seemed to be very tired. From time to time I looked through the window; he slept into the evening without interruption. When he awoke, my father invited him to sit down at the table. Our wine delighted him very much and he became quite cheerful. He said all kinds of things about Germany and the south of France, and I remember that he gave us a pompous and - in spite of his awkward French - highly poetic description of the sea which he had seen in Bordeaux. Sometimes he broke off in the middle of his tales as if he feared he would touch upon unpleasant points of his own life's history if he continued. When my aunt heard him speaking like this, she turned to my father and said that our guest was not a crazy man, but an original, and she listened to him with growing participation. She found that there was quite a lot of truth in everything he said and that he sometimes betrayed a great depth of spirit. The incomprehensible things he sometimes said were attributed to his bad pronunciation and imperfect knowledge of French. My aunt was pious and loved to speculate about metaphysical things which she called "philosophizing", and so she guided the conversation to texts of this sort. He then said peculiar things without becoming entangled in biblical references. I remember the contents of a long speech because my aunt wrote it down in her album the next day. The contents were something to this effect: "This is immortality. Everything good which we consider beautiful becomes a genius, though invisible, which no longer abandons us, but accompanies us in the most beautiful form throughout the whole of life. It takes to wing from our gravestone and congregates with the host of geniuses who already fill the world and advance the work of its perfection and transfiguration. These geniuses are births or, if you will, parts of our soul, which alone is immortal in these parts. The great artists have left the images of their geniuses behind for us in their works, but these are not the geniuses themselves. It is only their reflection in our earth's aura, like the sun reflected in the sea, or rather in the fog. The beautiful gods of Greece are such images of the most beautiful thoughts of an entire people - such is the nature of immortality."

My aunt, who would gladly have learned something about his own life and who always tried to steer the conversation back to him, asked (perhaps just to keep the conversation going), "Do you believe that you are immortal in this way?"

"I?" he said brusquely, "I, who sit here before you? No! I no longer think beautiful thoughts. The self that was mine ten years ago, that is immortal, to be sure." And reflecting on this he added confirmingly, "Yes, to be sure, that I is."

For all that, we knew nothing about him or his fate. We did not even know his name. My father once asked himhisname. He then put his head in his hands and replied, "I will tell it to you tomorrow. Believe me, sometimesitishardfor me to remember my name."

Now that was curious, but we had become so quickly accustomed to the eccentricity of this man that we accepted everything as if it must be so. It never occurred to anyone to express any kind of mistrust of this unknown and mysterious person. Despite all this, the evening passed in high spirits.

"By all means, I do believe that this man's spirit is disturbed," my father said to my aunt, "but this disturbed spirit is noble and, by nature, great and profound."

As for me, I considered him to be like a prophet, like a beneficent magician, and I was very happy when my father invited him to spend the night with us, for it was already late and he had not shown the slightest indication of wanting to leave. My aunt hastened to prepare a room for him, for she was glad to be able to philosophize with him, and my father made up his mind to ask him the following morning about his fate, which seemed so unhappy, and then to try to do something for him - to set his head straight in many respects. The man had an immense knowledge which could perhaps be useful, father said.

But the night ruined all these plans. About an hour after midnight, a servant who had come back from a secret outing with the desire to repair to his attic quarters woke up the whole house with his cries for help. I rushed to the corridor with my aunt at the same moment that my father opened his door. After the first glance through the corridor, my father hurried towards us,urging us to go back into the bedroom, but in half a minute I had already seen enough. The servant lay at the top of the stairs overcome by fear. In front of him the stranger stood in the most unusual costume. He had wrapped the white bedspread around his body and, since this was his only garment, there was something of the Greek statue about him. In his left hand he held a lamp and in his right an old dagger, a beautiful work of art belonging to the Sixteenth Century suit of armor which my father owned, and which was usually hanging in the parlor where the stranger had been sleeping. My father took the weapon away from him and led him to his room, where he lay down again.

I sat in my room trembling next to my aunt, the tears flowing. "The poor man," she continually sighed, "he really is insane. Oh what a shame, what a shame, a loss of so much spirit, so much knowledge, so much goodness. Yes, certainly, he is also very good, even his crazy eyes are still full of goodness." So there we sat until Papa came in and asked us to go back to bed. The stranger was lying in the deepest sleep and there would certainly be nothing more to fear the rest of the night.

"What an unusual adventure," my father said, shrugging his shoulders to conceal his own compassion for the stranger, for my father liked him as much as my aunt did.

When we awoke in the morning the stranger was walking around quietly in the park, but with his head sadly lowered. My aunt wanted to follow him but my father held her back. "It is better to leave him alone," he said. "If he comes again, I will see what can be done." He also asked us to leave the window. "If the stranger has any recollection of last night's mishap, it would be unpleasant for him to know that he is being watched."

So we left him alone. This time he did not stop at the Greek gods, but went into the thicket with slow steps, obviously very disheartened. A laborer reported that he had stretched out on a bench there. But when he did not appear after several hours, my father went to search for him. He was no longer in the park. From the balcony and from the window we looked out over the plain - he was nowhere to be seen. My father mounted his horse and traversed the entire area. He had vanished from sight, and he remained so. We never saw him again.

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