Eugène Sue: die Geheimnisse von Paris. Kritik von Szeliga.

§1 Eugène Sue declares, in one place of his Mysteries of Paris, “this work, without concealment, to be itself a bad book in an artistic respect,” yet adds that he could by no means allow it to be considered a bad book in a moral respect, “but rather would already be proud” of it, if it had even had the single result that some poor families had owed some assistance to the thoughts which it awakened.

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§2 The duty of criticism is to defend the work against this declaration of its author, but at the same time to attack him on account of it. Not him alone, but the present general aesthetic consciousness also, for whose sake Eugène Sue probably allowed himself to be misled into that unjust judgment.

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§3 The Stürmer und Dränger of the past century freed art from the fetters of morality. The Beautiful tore itself loose from the Good, stood upon its own feet, and has since then advanced upon its own ground. Art is free.

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§4 Freedom began in the past century to become the dogma of the age, and has remained so in all the principal domains up to the present day. Now it has been introduced ever more consistently and thus into every detail, so that it now overreaches and collapses within itself.

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§5 In politics—what has freedom accomplished? The Bourbons were compelled to yield to it when it made itself the deity even of the poorest and most wretched, when it became alive precisely within them, thus identified itself with the peuple. Freedom, popular sovereignty, has raised Louis Philippe to the throne. And now the peuple is the slave of the bourgeoisie.

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§6 How stands it with the freedom of science? It makes science itself into a religion, into the “religion of freedom,” and forgets thereby what it has so often expounded—that in religion I comport myself toward my deity humbly, bound, unfree. The freedom of science makes science the handmaid of freedom.

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§7 Art is free. It acknowledges only its own laws. It has its nature, its religion, its justice, its truth, its love. This may be seen just as well in the pictures of Kaulbach and Cornelius as it may be read in Tieck or also in every newer novel and drama. Even Raphael and Shakespeare, the highest models of romantic art, confirm it. The one paints, for example, angels—that is, winged children—thus creates his own nature, free from this heavy earthly nature. How in Shakespeare’s dramas a higher justice than this imperfect earthly one always carries off the victory, this indeed can never be sufficiently emphasized and praised.

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§8 But if art is thus free, why then does it concern itself at all with nature, with justice, or in more recent times even exclusively with love? Why does it not invent something entirely new, something absolutely never before existent? The free art stood much nearer to the raw nations than we, who have invented the phrase of freedom; one must at least study before one can find in the real world any existence even remotely similar to their fantastic creations. In our day it is not difficult to recognize everywhere the patterns, models, and archetypes. Nevertheless, art is now free—that is, it still has always something quite particular of its own which it adds. The forced, which it calls mysterious connection, it passes off as freedom.

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§9 One need but look at history: art has never been free. In classical antiquity it served the state; in the Middle Ages, the Church; now it is in the service of imagination—freedom. That in this service it is a slave, even if criticism did not itself remark it—they who rule make it sufficiently clear. Banished and in exile live the poets and artists of freedom, and indeed quite rightly so.

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§10 Art, therefore, is neither free from politics, science, and life, nor the reverse—and again, and yet again, the reverse.

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§11 Politics, science, and art—the more they think to go apart from one another, and each to win its own terrain in order to disport themselves upon it according to pleasure and caprice—their freedom-heavy heads collide and they fall into dizziness.

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§12 So, too, our present aesthetics and our contemporary taste in art reel and stagger.

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§13 To them Eugène Sue has rendered homage with that aforementioned declaration. But this criticism may not leave unrebuked, all the less as it is not directed against the person of the author, but against the immense number of his readers, whose judgment of his work he has stolen from their hearts.

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§14 “So, then, Eugène Sue is to put himself in the service of criticism?” you will mock. No, he is not to put himself in the service of criticism. He is himself a critic, whether he says so or not. This is precisely the new advance of art through The Mysteries of Paris, that henceforth it rests upon the intuition which sees the world as it is, does not make of it an arbitrary image, be it bright and luminous, painted with wishes and hopes, or dim and dark when melancholy and apprehensions guide the brush.

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§15 To prove this more closely in The Mysteries of Paris, I have set myself the task.

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§16 One further remark will not be superfluous. As, in general, the eighteenth century introduces and prepares our present conditions, so too did Lessing already then in fact—Nathan the Wise—show that the critic, if he will, can be a poet, that therefore criticism governs art.

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§17 Humanity has passed through history, has made history, and has for that been formed and advanced by it. Nevertheless, “the history of mankind, the history which has produced the thought of mankind and has set itself the task of founding human society, begins only with the eighteenth century of our reckoning of time,” and criticism must draw forth the secret of humanity from the rubble of what has happened and bring it clearly to light.

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§18 The epic, if it is no longer to be merely the free creation of the romanticist, like our wretched novels, recognizes in history its prototype. It sets itself the task to reveal the secret of human society—that is, the present before the present. The epic therefore represents not merely an occurrence limited by the collision of one-sided characters, in which humanity perhaps revealed itself with especial transparency, but rather lays as its foundation the entire world-condition in which the present is ensnared, in which all and each are more or less involved; the labyrinths in which we wander, from which to escape we seek the guiding thread; the wide open field of objectivity which surrounds us and which withdraws from our insight not through intentional concealment but only through its abundance. The epic lets the present go to judgment with itself. The epic creates for the thought that the present in itself is nothing—not merely the eternal boundary between past and future, but the rent which must ever again be joined together, that divides immortality from transience—its living body.

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§19 This is the meaning of The Mysteries of Paris. They are the mysteries of Europe. The correctness or untenability of this assertion must reveal itself from the closer consideration of the several mysteries of Paris.

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§20 “A penne signifies, in the language of thieves and murderers, an inn of the lowest sort.”

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§21 “The host of such a house is usually a former convict who has served his sentence, or it is in the possession of a woman who has been in the penitentiary, and the guests are the dregs of society—released galley-slaves, rogues, thieves, and murderers.”

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§22 This is the first scene of The Mysteries of Paris.

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§23 Later, in two great episodes, the dreadful prisons of St. Lazare and La Force are described.

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§24 The island of the money-changer is then again a cave of crime, into which the reader can see himself introduced only with his hair standing on end.

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§25 Nor is the reader spared from entering still other lurking places of the lowest vice.

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§26 But not these dens and hiding-places of crime and vice are the mysteries, whose existence we have through Eugène Sue’s work unexpectedly come to know. Crime and vice are not so shy and timid as to hide themselves away and leave it to us to seek them out in order to come upon the secret of their hidden existence; bold and defiant, they drive their insolence so far that they not merely venture into the places of the liveliest intercourse, but are precisely there at home; indeed, they mock at the law that is hostile to them to such a degree that rogues and murderers celebrate their dreadful hours of recreation—when they rest from the criminal deed but sip the fame thereof among rabble and harlequin—quite near to the palace of justice and the courts of law! Thus, not the caves of crime are the mysteries, but the crimes and the criminals themselves.

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§27 With more shudder than disgust we turn away from the unfathomable wantonness in malice of an Owl; from the unaccountable madness of a Chourineur, to whom murder is a delight; from the sinking of a Schoolmaster into the bottomless swamp of evil; from the unbending defiance of the Martials against God and men, world-order and law; from the little cripple, that little devil who promises to become a whole hell; from the Red-Arm and the Skeleton, from the hostess of the White Rabbit, and from all those whom to recognize as of the same nature with us, who hold ourselves for the images of God, wounds our feeling. We ask in astonishment: how are these alien, insensible, cruel, malicious, incomprehensible beings possible in this good, well-ordered, civilized, Christian world? We do not believe in the humanity of these dehumanized humans. Yet we despair also of solving the riddle that this hell upon earth sets before us. We fall silent before an unfathomable mystery, which we do well to avoid if our purses and our lives are dear to us.

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§28 In truth, science and life, religion and the state wrestle with this question: how are these savages possible within civilization? Or rather, they all put this question aside, leave the fact of these dreadful existences to rest as it stands, and either openly declare war upon them, or comport themselves toward them in the threatening calm of armed peace. The religion of love excommunicates them, the state protects itself from them by strict laws and cruel prisons, and science, art, and life desire nothing but that each may enjoy its own freedom undisturbed.

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§29 Religion indeed has its theories of sin, but these can have for it only historical value, in so far as Christ found a sinful, corrupted world to redeem; or else it cannot be in earnest with them, for Christ has taken sin out of the world, therefore abolished sin altogether. Bold as it may be, yet it is the immovable truth of Christianity what the missionary preacher—the “Son of Man, the Son of the Most High and yet our brother,” who appears to him “at the right hand of God,” “the keys of the abyss held high in His hand”—lets resound to the world: “All guilt is expiated, and God now demands no more that ye, in order to be saved, should fulfil His commandments, but only that ye should grasp My merit!”

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§30 And yet crime and criminals exist—an inexplicable, shattering mystery! Thou canst not bring the sinful act into harmony with the impossibility of sin, nor comprehend that thou art nevertheless, and indeed not merely materially, touched by that which stands wholly outside of and without the least connection to thee.

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§31 Or, if thou wert able to see through and to grasp this mystery, thou wouldst then have to recognize and comprehend it as thine own mystery. Should not then these dehumanized beings once again become men to thee? Wouldst thou not have to find the ground of this dreadful unnaturalness in thine own exaltation above nature, the cause of this savagery in thine own over-culture? Couldst thou then still longer send to the galleys, cause death-sentences to be executed—in short, impose punishments that are only punishments? Wouldst thou not rather think first of the most general improvement, not of the criminal alone, but above all of the social condition, which, since the inheritance has passed from generation to generation, and every generation has taken pains to increase its inherited portion, has become the poison-swollen cause of the most dreadful savagery?

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§32 This thou wouldst have to, shouldst, couldst, wouldst do—if this savagery were not a mystery to thee. But the mystery is precisely a mystery to thee, and thou must, shalt, canst, wilt know nothing of all this.

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§33 The mystery, however, is an immense power, toward which thou canst only comport thyself passively—the protecting and punishing law is only the consequence of the passivity of society, of its threatened, raw force over against those for whom nothing is sacred. The law, the earthly as the heavenly, strikes the individual criminal, the single misdeed, while already new crimes occur, new malefactors impudently raise their heads. The womb from which they arise is mystery, and the hidden source cannot be stopped.

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§34 The result of the annual campaigns of civilization against savagery can therefore be derived from nothing else than the respective tabular compilations; and according to these it appears by no means favorable and pleasing—indeed, from year to year ever less pleasing and less favorable, and in the same measure, an incomprehensible phenomenon!—in proportion as culture increases.

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§35 This dreadful savagery is one of the great mysteries that make Europe shudder; it is one of the mysteries of our epic, of the Mysteries of Paris. The states exhaust themselves in vain efforts to diminish the number of crimes—vainly, because what is the foundation of all civilization, religion, has no love and may have none where faith does not meet it. Indeed, the Church bids her servant accompany the murderer on his way to the scaffold; but by this she can only wish to preserve the appearance of absolute power over hearts; in earnest she despairs of the obduracy of the evildoer. The execution of the punishment here, as the terror-picture of eternal punishments beyond—the dreadfully grand contempt of God and men shown by the mother Martial—make the one into a weak clatter of the axe, the other into the dying threat of the priest; and for the multitude, it is not the bloody vengeance executed upon the criminal, which at the same time points, as a yet milder beginning, to the dreadful penances of hell—it is rather the impotence of this vengeance and the most brutal unbelief that form the effect, which then, immediately after the act of justice, expresses itself in the most unbridled excesses and new crimes.

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§36 It cannot here be the point to let those characters and scenes of The Mysteries of Paris which make our hair stand on end pass one by one in review; rather, it suffices to have directed attention to the fact that it was not the author’s aim to lead us about through the hiding-places of criminals, to furnish us knowledge of their secret language and to teach us astonishing new wickednesses, but rather to let work upon us the mystery of the motives to evil, the mystery of the subterranean sources from which vice, misdeed, and crime, like thick streams of lava, pour forth in devastating overflow, in all their destructive power undermining the ground of society.

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§37 If now the savagery is to civilization—or rather to Christianity, upon which alone the culture of the present rests—an insoluble riddle, and if as this riddle it constitutes, in The Mysteries of Paris, one of the foundations upon which the action, the characters, and the prospect of an entirely transformed future are built, then it must at once be examined whether, analogously to the various factors whose product is our present world-condition, so also the consequence of Christianity—Law—has found in the given epic a corresponding representation as the basis for the more ideal part of the poem.

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§38 How we live in the State and in Right is again a mystery to us. We accept the actuality of the State, without further ado, as the truth of Right.

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§39 Before the law and the judge all are equal, high and low, rich and poor. This maxim stands at the very top in the creed of the State. If now nevertheless the opposite obtrudes itself upon us visibly and palpably, we again feel ourselves incapable—or rather, the State feels itself unable—to grasp this phenomenon at its root. It cannot even admit it, and we bow submissively beneath the mysterious decree.

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§40 To be sure, we see a general terror on account of the increasing poverty; to be sure, we hear urgent demands for emancipation, for example of women, of the Jews, of the press; but the essential ground of that terror and of this vehemence continually withdraws itself both from theory and from practice, and therefore neither remedy nor information succeeds. In the phenomena belonging here, a mysterious presentiment of a deep-lying sore spot within the organization of our legal conditions indeed arises, but the soft voice is soon drowned out by the fundamental and doctrinal maxims in which we grow up and are educated. As men, we are wont to say, we grieve over the fate of this or that unfortunate person and feel compassion for him; but law and Right must take their course. With this we concede that there is still another, indeed even a higher justice than the Right which is here below exercised in the State. But that is a concession against our will—we know not how—it is itself already a revolutionary comportment against the infallibility of the law. Nevertheless, it lies entirely outside our power to refrain from that which, on such occasions, we call the power of the sympathetic heart.

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§41 We feel ourselves, with the bequest of the past, unhappy, unsatisfied within the historical State and Right; but concerning the happiness that we wish and hope for, we have nothing but the fancy of another State and a better Right. What we wish is a mystery to us, because what we have and what we are is a mystery to us. We feel ill at ease, we have apprehensions, and therefore we reject without criticism. The epic exercises the critique. And how from it—to which, indeed, a destructive assault upon all that exists is imputed, without at the same time building up—how from it simply the better longed-for proceeds for those upon whom the reproach of mere tearing-down is not laid, as nothing but a dream—I shall later develop at Rudolf. Here I have at first only to do with the demonstration of that which must fall.

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§42 The stone-cutter Morel, who languishes in the bitterest poverty, speaks, in his naïve uprightness, the mystery—without knowing it—very plainly. He says: “If only the rich knew, if only the rich knew!” “The misfortune lies in this, that they do not know what poverty is.”

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§43 How should they know it? or rather: how could they know it? how were it possible that they knew it? Rich and poor are mysterious opposites. “I am poor and plagued by despair,” says the stone-cutter Morel, “therefore I speak thus,” namely: “It is quite good that one punishes evil, yet perhaps it would be better if one prevented it. One has remained honest until one’s fiftieth year; then extreme need, hunger, drives one to evil, and there is a rogue the more, whereas, if one had known—but what use are such thoughts? The world is once for all as it is. I am poor and plagued by despair, therefore I speak thus; were I rich, I would speak of feasts and pleasures.”

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§44 Rich and poor can never form a unity. Even one and the same person, one and the same human life, is rent violently asunder when fate hurls it into the dreadful whirlpool of that opposition. Clara and her mother, the Baroness von Fermont, have been rich, when they themselves are cast out of the lurking-place of the receivers of stolen goods; when the mother, a beggar-woman, is received only by death, and Clara thereupon in the hospital is exposed to the cruelties, pitilessnesses, and shamelessnesses of science—of the science to which it does not at all occur that, through the shredding of the corpses of those poor who could find no other refuge than the hospital in which to die, it, as it were, immortalizes the irreconcilable difference between rich and poor (riches already being present here if only the costs of burial can be raised; possession and non-possession is therefore the true opposition) even beyond death.

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§45 To be sure, this inequality does not turn its point directly against that highest principle of Right, when the rich man namely remains without knowledge of what poverty is, or when merely the cadaver of the poor man—even already while yet alive—serves for the enrichment of science; indirectly, however, the secret sore spot of Right is nevertheless touched.

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§46 Meanwhile the mystery of rightlessness also asserts itself in far more evident fashion.

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§47 The epileptic’s sister is maltreated in the most abominable way by her husband, who has given himself over to drink and to a dissolute woman. After he has already, on account of that woman, completely abandoned her, and she has thereby been put in a position to be able undisturbed to earn the bare necessities of life for herself and her children, even then she is exposed to his assaults and ill-usage, and must let it befall her that he robs her of her earnings, destroys her goods and chattels, indeed even tears away the innocent daughter in order to make her into a source of income for himself and his concubine.

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§48 Will not the law protect the unhappy wife and mother if she betakes herself into a protection? To everyone, indeed, this sanctuary stands open.—Well then, if he can bear the costs of the suit. But how is the poor woman, who has been robbed of her goods and chattels, to raise those costs in order to seek Right against her robber? She would have to become herself a criminal and commit a theft. Yet for that she is too honest; and because she is unhappy, poor, and honest, she is at the same time also rightless—dreadful consequence!

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§49 In similar and other conditions of rightlessness stand Madame Duresnel over against her husband; the dreadful Schoolmaster; the Marquise von Harville over against her husband, smitten by an abominable disease; Germain over against his father and then over against his principal, the notary Ferrand. Most cruelly, however, does this state of exception, this impossibility of being able to partake of the benefits of Right, present itself in the infamies of the hypocritical notary Ferrand against Louise Morel.

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§50 If with this the mysterious Unright enters into Right itself, and thereby the cloudless clarity which we are always accustomed to bring into connection with Right, and are accustomed to, is considerably dimmed; if further savagery and rightlessness spread ever more widely, so that civilization and Right, over against them, must shut themselves off more and more and become exclusive: then the natural question arises—what is the mystery of the positive, namely of Right itself and of civilization itself? For a mystery it must in any case be for the excluded, else they would not be excluded, savage, raw, oppressed, rightless. To the answering of this question in artistic fashion, too, our epic must submit itself, if it is—as it must—truly to give a picture of our entire world-condition, a critique of the same.

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§51 The mystery seeks to withdraw itself from consideration with a new turn. Hitherto it stood, as the absolutely enigmatic, slipping away from all hold and grasp, the Negative over against the Truthful, the Real, the Positive; now it withdraws into the same as its invisible content. Thereby, however, it also gives up the unconditioned impossibility of being known. If the shell is shattered, the kernel must come to light. It is indeed to be foreseen what a firm casing the mystery will choose for its veiling. And in truth it seems as though there were an insurmountable impenetrability with which cultivated society defies every attempt to get behind its proper essence, to fathom its inmost principle of life. Brazen in crime, shy and humble in poverty, the mystery now steps forth light, unembarrassed, coquettish, and in its assured incomprehensibility makes unblushing sport with all who do it homage or who venture to sue in earnest for the possession of the fair Unknown. – Nevertheless, a new attempt to pry out the kernel is here indispensable.

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§52 Culture is form; not merely form, how one clears one’s throat and spits, how one makes servants and bows, what cut the dress, what trim the beard must have in order to be in fashion, etc.; rather, culture is the form into which the most salient properties of human cohabitation and activity flow together, in order to emerge from it as plastic formations. The nobility of birth, the preference of upbringing, the honor of a particular estate, the fortune of wealth, the security of knowledge melt into a splendid cast for which the popular name is: general culture. That is culture, or rather the ideal of culture, as it hovers before those who in actuality hold themselves to be cultivated. That is their phantasy of culture.

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§53 Is now the content of this precious form appropriate? Is it the universal reason which makes social conversations into the limelight through which the problems of humanity and of its development toward perfection through history are set in a clear and unequivocal light? Is it the pure, all-embracing love of man which makes sociability into an harmonious whole in which rhythm and measure of love alone—and not rank and birth, not wealth nor arrogance—assign the places, distribute the stresses? Is the freedom of movement in social intercourse a consequence of the will that overcomes all barriers, which acknowledges only reason and love, yet also prizes them above all and raises them to the throne? Is, in general, what we call general culture the form of the universal, the eternal, the ideal, the form of the striving for, dissemination and enjoyment of universal happiness?

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§54 The Mysteries of Paris will not fail to give the answer here.

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§55 That this answer will, moreover, turn out negative, may be expected from the fact that there is talk at all of the mystery of cultivated society. Were the content of such a kind that the question could be answered in the affirmative—that is, were it wholly consonant with the form—form here being culture—then it would have to shine through immediately and sun-clear, indeed lie downright upon the surface, so that no unveiling would be needed.

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§56 The ball at the ambassador’s *** is the most suitable introduction into the great world. Here, sunlight is conjured into the night, spring-green and the splendor of summer into winter. We feel ourselves at once in the mood to believe in the miracle of the divine presence in the human breast, all the more when beauty and grace support the conviction that we are in the immediate vicinity of ideals.

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§57 Clémence von Harville and the Countess Sara Mac Gregor step—fairest among the fair—into this circle. They are engaged in eager conversation. From beings who seem to have been created only to dispense happiness and joy, how greedily we less favored ones would eavesdrop upon the manner in which we might be able to become the blessing of beloved children, the whole fullness of a husband’s happiness. We listen... we are astonished, we do not trust our ears, having assumed what made us eavesdroppers: it is aimed at an unfaithfulness to the husband; the Countess Mac Gregor is the advocate that Madame von Harville grant a rendezvous to a young handsome man who is only unhappy because he has not yet been heard. The same is granted, and afterward the countess triumphs; for an anonymous billet will give the deceived husband knowledge of the criminal meeting: the Marquise von Harville will not only be unmasked by her husband, but—what to the Countess Mac Gregor counts as the main matter—Rudolf, the sovereign Prince of Gerolstein, will now despise the marquise as much as he has hitherto loved her, and this rival will no longer stand in the way of the fulfillment of that promise according to which the Countess Mac Gregor hopes one day, after all, to share Rudolf’s throne. After all; for her whole life, from the moment she became conscious of the power of her beauty, has been directed to this goal; and she was once near to attaining it. Enterprising enough to become, in consequence of a secret marriage, the mother of a child whose father is the hereditary Prince of Gerolstein, nevertheless this child, even as she bore it under her heart, had for her no other value than this: to be able to come forward openly with her claims upon the throne. When all her art, directed to this end, is wrecked upon the circumstances and the firmness of the old duke, it is no difficulty to her to cast her child into a foreign land; its death causes her no grief. When she later may hope that her daughter is still among the living, indeed that the same, through a wondrous concatenation of Rudolf’s destinies, enjoys his special protection, then it is not mother-love that awakens in her—even if not anew, then for the first time—but a new confidence to gain her goal now with certainty.

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§58 Instead of the generally human endeavor which we are entitled to expect from beauty, culture, and distinguished station, we find the whole striving of the countess directed to individual egoistic advantage, of whose attainment we, considering the manner and way in which the countess works toward it, cannot at all promise ourselves that she will apply it to the happiness of the prince of Gerolstein’s subjects.

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§59 Sarah is, moreover, by no means an exception in these glittering circles, even if a summit. The immoral relation of the Duchess of Lucenay with the seductive Vicomte de St. Remy is not spoken of in conversation with indignation, no—but as though there were question of a quite natural and, besides, highly interesting and attractive phenomenon. Yes, the fair duchesses and countesses even let a certain envy peep forth that they themselves are not the objects of this man’s adoration, who “is for women what courtesans are for men.”

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§60 The Vicomte de St. Remy, endowed with all advantages of mind, with all charms of body, not only delights in this degrading rôle, but puts everything at stake to be able to continue playing it—that is, among other things, to possess a “boudoir” for his amorous adventures. Everything here is calculated upon the undisturbedness of his happiness and especially upon the deception of those who could, and with right have an interest to, disturb it; furthermore upon this, that one could say without figure: “the ladies who crossed the dangerous threshold to reach Monsieur de St. Remy went by flowery paths to their ruin.” He stakes everything—fortune, the capacities of his mind, the energy of his will, even honor: he becomes a forger. At last he has so far exhausted and squandered all his forces that there does not remain to him even the courage to take his life.

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§61 To this man the Duchess of Lucenay gives herself, with a self-sacrifice worthy of a better object. The most moral relation in itself—love—is rendered unclean by such a contact, or rather, with this contact it ceases to be love.

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§62 In truth, both the Marquise von Harville and the Duchess of Lucenay lack the satisfaction of the heart. They have not found in marriage the object of love; thus they seek the object of love outside. Love has remained to them in marriage a mystery, which nevertheless they are driven to unveil by the imperious urging of the heart. Thus they give themselves over to a mysterious love. Whereas in marriage love ought to be the kernel and eternal content, the cultivated world, however, will see in it only an external bond and a means, say, for the propagation of the pure race, the victims of these loveless marriages are involuntarily driven to look down upon love itself as something external, a so-called “affair,” and to take for the inner, animating, essential element of love the romantic, the mysterious.

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§63 But what is the mystery of love? Not the shadowed walks in the shrubbery, not the natural half-dark of moonlit night, not the artificial which is produced by costly curtains and draperies, not the scent of flowers and oils, not the gentle and stupefying tone of harps and organs, not the power of the forbidden. All this is only the mysterious; the mystery therein is the exciting, intoxicating, benumbing, the power of sensuality—which we indeed do not wish to admit to ourselves, but which only on that account has such immense power over us, because we banish it from ourselves, do not acknowledge it as our own nature—our own nature, which we would then also be in a position to master as soon as it strove to assert itself at the cost of reason, of true love, of the power of the will. Sensuality rules us unconditionally only because we feel a sweet charm in letting ourselves be tyrannized by it.

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§64 If, then, love ceases to be the essential of marriage, of morality altogether, sensuality becomes the mystery of love, of morality, of cultivated society—sensuality both in its exclusive sense, where it is the trembling of the nerves, the glowing stream in the veins, and also in the more comprehensive, in which it heightens itself into an appearance of spiritual power, rises into lust of dominion, ambition, desire of fame.

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§65 The Duchess of Lucenay, the Countess Mac Gregor, both represent the two meanings of sensuality as the mystery of cultivated society.

[Notes for §65 here]

§66 It cannot, for this conception, be indifferent and thus merely accidental that Eugène Sue introduces us into the great world precisely at a ball. The dance is the most universal manifestation of sensuality as mystery. The immediate contact, the enclosing of the two sexes which the pair presupposes, are permitted in the dance because, despite the evidence and the sweet sensation that actually makes itself felt thereby, they nevertheless do not count as sensual contact and enclosure. For if they truly counted as such, it would not be to be seen why society should exercise this indulgence in the dance alone, while conversely it pursues with such harsh condemnation what, if it wished to show itself elsewhere with equal freedom, would draw upon itself the brand of the most unpardonable offense against custom and modesty and merciless expulsion.

[Notes for §66 here]

§67 To be sure, the poet has omitted to mix us into the throng of dancers. It was his concern only to sketch the background from which the bustle of cultivated society stands out. This he has completely achieved by setting us at a ball; and even if the figures in the foreground—the Marquise von Harville, the Duchess of Lucenay, the Countess Mac Gregor, the Vicomte de St. Remy, Rudolf, the commandant, and others—have veiled the groups in the background, yet the latter is itself so wondrously painted that the imagination can with ease draw into it those ball-phenomena for which we possess the models in the recollection of our own experience. We picture to ourselves the coquettish triumphant one, swarmed about and borne up by numerous adorers. We feel, from the mischievous glance of her eye, the dissatisfaction of her heart; we see, in the capricious play with reason and unreason, with will and ill will, with heart and heartlessness of her slaves, that she yearns for seriousness; we surmise that she fights only with coquetry—this weapon of un-nature—in order to let herself be conquered by a great nature, whose triumph she will then, intoxicated, celebrate in the embrace of the victor.

[Notes for §67 here]

§68 In truth, the mystery of social tone and tact—the mystery when the look is to be raised and lowered at the right time, how servants and bows are to be measured out more or less stiffly and formally, how words are to be weighed, speech hollowed out to emptiness—the mystery of this utmost un-nature is the longing to return to nature.

[Notes for §68 here]

§69 Therefore an appearance like Cecily’s works so electrically in cultivated society, is crowned with such extraordinary successes. She, brought up as a slave among slaves, without culture, thrown back upon her nature alone—which at first is only a rich treasure of predispositions to excellences as well as to aberrations—this nature is to her the sole source of life. Suddenly transferred to a court under constraint and decorum, she soon learns to see through the mystery thereof; learns to use the power of nature, her nature, and soon outstrips in her triumphs the most experienced coquette. In this sphere, which she can unconditionally rule, since her power—the power of her nature—passes for an enigmatic charm, Cecily must of necessity go astray into the measureless; whereas once, when she was still a slave, the same nature taught her to resist every unworthy demand of the mighty master and to keep faith with her love.

[Notes for §69 here]

§70 Cecily is the unveiled mystery of cultivated society. The despised senses at last break through the dams and rush forth in complete unbridledness. Yet this unbridledness is already a wish behind the dams. What is fastened by chains is always only the power and the principle to shake them off.

[Notes for §70 here]

§71 The mystery, as that of cultivated society, indeed withdraws itself from opposition into the interior. Nevertheless the great world again has exclusively its circles in which it preserves this sanctuary. It is, as it were, the chapel for this Holy of Holies. But for those in the forecourt the chapel itself is the mystery. Culture is thus, in its exclusive position, for the people the same riddle that poverty is for the rich, coarseness for the cultivated.

[Notes for §71 here]

§72 Culture cannot and will not draw as yet all estates and distinctions into its circle. Only Christianity and morality are in a position to found universal realms upon this earth. Christianity is the realm not of this world, yet upon this world. Christ is the Son of God, yet the Savior of men. The dominion of morality is, conversely, a realm of this world, yet not upon this world. In conscience, our earthly, human conscience, lies the popular sovereignty of this realm; but the people itself is an ideal which here below is not yet found. The law of Christianity is inscribed by God in the believing heart, in feeling; the law of morality understanding gives to itself. Christianity is universal monarchy; the realm of morality, universal republic. The pious fears God’s wrath, hopes for God’s grace; the righteous is a maker of his right. Thus absolutely separated, Christianity lies on the yonder side, morality on this side.

[Notes for §72 here]

§73 This mere confrontation of concepts, however, the present has recognized, can bring forth only sham battles in which blank cartridges crack. Peace maneuvers, to exercise the forces for war. In the airy realm of concepts Christianity and morality may be irreconcilable opposites; evangelical Christianity and living morality nowadays reach each other the hand: it is a matter of proving Christianity through life and deed; quiet, withdrawn contemplation, directed toward God and one’s own interior, no longer suffices.

[Notes for §73 here]

§74 The notary Ferrand goes frequently to mass, often sees clergymen at his house.

[Notes for §74 here]

§75 He dwells in a gloomy house, disdains splendor and elegance, lives extremely frugally, and this carelessness for well-being is proof of his unselfishness and strictness of morals.

[Notes for §75 here]

§76 He speaks, without regard, the language of probity against the unworthy St. Remy: “I feel absolutely no sympathy for you. Your father was a man of honor, and I would not wish to see his name before the assizes. I am kind toward those who deserve it; as an honest man I hate the cheats.”

[Notes for §76 here]

§77 To Madame von Orbigny he declares outright: “If your husband should take a resolution against his daughter, Madame von Harville, which does not appear to me seemly, then you must not count upon my cooperation. Open and straight—that has always been my conduct.”

[Notes for §77 here]

§78 Indignant, he rejects the Countess Mac Gregor’s proposal to assist her in the substitution of a child: “That is a baseness! For the first time in my life I experience such a disgrace, which I have not deserved—Thou knowest it, good God!”

[Notes for §78 here]

§79 He gives to the poor stone-cutter, who has been so unfortunate as to lose a diamond, 1,300 francs, and lets him, only for order’s sake, draw a bill at three months, which can be renewed every quarter. He wards off thanks with his usual honest brusqueness: “Very well, very well—what I do is quite simple.”

[Notes for §79 here]

§80 In the deliverance of the Fleur-de-Marie he wishes, out of philanthropic modesty, to be known only under the name of the Benefactor.

[Notes for §80 here]

§81 Jacques Ferrand is a pious and upright man and, as such, finds the most general recognition.

[Notes for §81 here]

§82 To him flow deposits, trusts, investments—in short, all those affairs which rest upon the most acknowledged rectitude.

[Notes for §82 here]

§83 The parish priest admonishes Louise, the daughter of the stone-cutter, and says to her, with reference to Ferrand, that she must be doubly vicious if in so pious a house she could go astray, where she would always have the best examples before her eyes.

[Notes for §83 here]

§84 Germain calls the notary hard and strict, but the most honest man in the world.

[Notes for §84 here]

§85 The Count von Orbigny, when it is a matter of making his will, wishes to regulate himself not according to the utterance of his own notary—for the latter, in order to oblige him, might express himself in his sense—but according to that of a man whose strict rectitude has become proverbial: Monsieur Jacques Ferrand.

[Notes for §85 here]

§86 If a man like St. Remy expects to find in him a good-natured or ridiculous person—since he was accustomed to imagine people of proverbial rectitude as almost stupid and silly—this is, in his fashion, a very weighty testimony to Ferrand’s true worth.

[Notes for §86 here]

§87 The Duchess of Lucenay does not hesitate to entrust to him the secret of her honor and love; for, she addresses him: “I know that you are a man of honor and integrity.”

[Notes for §87 here]

§88 Monsieur Jacques Ferrand is the rare and precious notary who advises to good businesses.

[Notes for §88 here]

§89 The Duke of Lucenay extols him: he is a man of truly antique honesty.

[Notes for §89 here]

§90 Mother Bouvard, the saleswoman at the Temple, says he is an extraordinarily pious, truly holy man; he has in his office a crucifix, as though it were a sacristy.

[Notes for §90 here]

§91 At the mere urgent recommendation and wish of the pious and respected Ferrand, the prison of the Fleur-de-Marie opens.

[Notes for §91 here]

§92 The abbé consoles him in illness and says to him: We are all alike sinners, but not all of us possess the Christian love which distinguishes you, my worthy friend. O, rare are they who, like you, tear themselves loose from earthly goods and think only how they may employ them, even during their lifetime, in a truly Christian way. I repeat it, people like you are rare, and therefore not to be blessed enough.

[Notes for §92 here]

§93 Because few people—Polidori speaks the essence of the matter—like Jacques Ferrand, unite wealth with piety, understanding with beneficence.

[Notes for §93 here]

§94 Enough: Jacques Ferrand is what rich and poor, high and low—in short, the world—calls a pious and upright man. His reputation as such is well-founded and stands unshakably firm. So firm that he can hand the unhappy Louise Morel a sleeping draft, overpower her in sleep, dishonor her; and when his victim awakes at his side and wishes to flee in horror, hold her back and with the mien of astonishment ask: “What is the matter with you? Am I not here with your permission? I took advantage of your sleep? I? you jest. Who is to believe this lie of yours? Are you truly foolish? What will you say to your father? That it pleased you to receive me here with you? that stands you free; you will see how he receives you. Would you be so impudent as to speak of violence? Do you demand a proof for your lie?” And he has provided for the proof.

[Notes for §94 here]

§95 His reputation stands unshakably firm—so firm that Louise, when she is already far gone with child, overhears a plan of the notary against her life and is later horribly maltreated, yet does not dare to call for help for fear he might smother her and then say she died in childbirth.

[Notes for §95 here]

§96 The reputation of his piety and uprightness stands unshakably firm—so firm that in this way he can murder his own child and then cruelly accuse the pitiable mother of infanticide, yet divert the suspicion of paternity upon Germain.

[Notes for §96 here]

§97 But to what end further enumerate the cruelties and crimes of this monster? The reputation of the notary Ferrand as a pious and upright man stands, indeed, unshakably firm—so firm that, when Rudolf compels him—terrible punishment—to do truly pious use of the criminally amassed fortune, in atonement of the misery he has spread among his fellow men; compels him now truly to act uprightly, then the parish priest and the world bless him. The reputation of his piety and uprightness follows him beyond the grave.

[Notes for §97 here]

§98 The mystery of his crimes, on the other hand, he takes ununveiled—at least publicly ununveiled—into the grave. There they will be forgotten like his ashes. What survives him are his good deeds; what makes him immortal is his testament—the bank for the poor; what does not go down together with his part subject to transience is his hypocrisy: his bequest is the mystery of seeming piety and rectitude.

[Notes for §98 here]

§99 Jacques Ferrand is the perfect hypocrite, to whom even death is not in a position to tear off the mask. In order to be able to continue playing the rôle for a long series of years, the stuff and nutriment of the time lend even to narrowness enough art and skill.

[Notes for §99 here]

§100 Madame Roland, later Countess von Orbigny, stepmother of Madame von Harville, furnishes the proof of this.

[Notes for §100 here]

§101 If for the notary hypocrisy is now a matter of the fullest consciousness, but for Madame Roland, as it were, instinct, then between them stands the great mass of those who cannot get behind the mystery and yet feel themselves involuntarily driven to wish that they might. Thus it is not superstition that leads high and low into the uncanny dwelling of the charlatan Bradamanti (Abbé Polidori), no—it is the seeking of the mystery in order to stand justified before the world. The fallen girl will not become a despised mother; the charlatan knows a means. There is question of a murder; but the murderer will not be a murderer, but honored, loved, and blessed. Bradamanti has a poison.

[Notes for §101 here]

§102 Now the mystery has become common property, the mystery of all the world and of each individual. Either it is my art or my instinct, or I can procure it for myself as a purchasable ware. The mystery is therefore by no means any longer concealment and inaccessibility itself, but rather that it conceals itself, makes itself inaccessible, or better still, that I conceal it, I make it inaccessible. It is now the closed doors behind which the mystery is hatched, brewed, perpetrated. Therewith, however, the possibility is given that I can hearken at it, eavesdrop upon it, spy it out.

[Notes for §102 here]

§103 But if thou thyself hast something to hide which shuns the light, there is granted thee a malicious pleasure to see another’s mystery unmasked. Thou feelest the bliss of schadenfreude that the other is not better than thou art, and pursuest him with mockery and scorn that he nevertheless wished to be better than thou. And to be better than the other each one wishes, because he not only keeps the springs of his good actions secret, but strives to wrap his bad ones altogether in impenetrable darkness.

[Notes for §103 here]

§104 This schadenfreude is then also the source of common daily gossip, in which neighbors, by communicating the results of their spying, talk themselves into consolation about their own light- and water-shy interior.

[Notes for §104 here]

§105 If for this reason everyone has a propensity to wish to get behind another’s mysteries, only few will be in a position to satisfy their desire. Most favorably situated in this regard are the servants. They see their masters ever in négligé. Nevertheless they are not disinterested enough; the naked exposure forces itself upon them too much of itself for them to come to the pure and unclouded enjoyment which lies in the mere unveiling, without any individual use or harm being to be promised or foreseen from it. Patterson and Boyer, the coachman and the valet of the Vicomte de St. Remy, therefore indeed turn the ruin of their master, without compunction, to their own advantage, and thereby represent the bitter irony of fate, which makes the servant the master of his master, gives him into the power and mercy of his servant; yet they are not unselfconscious enough for the comic irony which is so little egoistic that it contents itself with mere derision. The position of the porter, on the other hand, affords the proportional independence to pour out upon the mysteries of the house a free, disinterested, though rough and embarrassing mockery. Anastasia Pipelet, the porter’s wife—how she never tires of flouting the enamored, oft-mentioned commandant Karl Robert; how she procures for herself and her friend, the charwoman, the pleasure of seeing, through the veil, the face of the unhappy lady before she points her the way to the man who awaits her in the splendid great-flowered dressing-gown and his embroidered Greek velvet cap upon his head; how she cries out laughing: “today it seems it will be something proper. I wish much pleasure!”—Anastasia Pipelet has the task, as it were, to open the little war against the mystery.

[Notes for §105 here]

§106 Her husband, the porter Alfred Pipelet, stands at her side with less success. For if Anastasia attacks the mystery with mockery, the mystery to which Alfred succumbs is nothing but a mockery, a trick that is played upon him, only that he will not believe in the farce, but calls in the police against the dreadful plot of his mortal enemy Cabrion. And what has Cabrion done to him? He has, appearing like an apparition, given him a kiss upon his bald, venerable head. He has, in mysterious fashion, contrived to practice his detested picture over the chaste marriage-bed of the two Pipelets. He has called Pipelet his friend for life, etc. But Pipelet remains, at each new farce, unmoved, as at all important occasions of his life, and can only by his wife’s universal remedy, Abspath, be restored again to his senses.

[Notes for §106 here]

§107 His belief is the mystery of others. Thus he believes also in the chastity of his wife, believes her every moment exposed to unworthy and shameless attacks. Ever he hears the cry for help of her wounded modesty. And when he thinks of the abominable attempt, he becomes quite red with shame. But when at last the shameless persons, whose victim he believes his wife to be, come past his door, and it is a matter of boldly going up to them and calling them to account, then indeed this is also his first thought—of which, however, he can only remind himself with a sigh. He considers that he would have to expose himself to their looks, perhaps even to their foolish talk; then his interior is outraged and he loses control. “I am not worse than another,” he relates, “but when the shameless people went by here, the blood rose to my face and I could do no otherwise; I quickly put my hand before my eyes not to see the voluptuous villains.” Yes, good Alfred, that is the mystery—that thou holdest thine eyes shut. For hadst thou the courage to see, every mystery would soon dissolve into nothing before thy steady look.

[Notes for §107 here]

§108 The victory over the childish old man is the most decided defeat of the mystery. A more intelligent, more courageous man will not let himself be deceived and cheated by the farce, will concede it no power over himself.

[Notes for §108 here]

§109 If, then, Anastasia mocks the mystery, in Alfred there comes to light the self-mockery of the mystery. In him the humor of the mystery develops.

[Notes for §109 here]

§110 One step still remains to be taken. The mystery, through its own consequence, as we have seen in Pipelet and through Cabrion, has been driven so far as to degrade itself into mere farce. It now only depends on the individual no longer lending himself to play the foolish comedy.

[Notes for §110 here]

§111 Laughter-Dove takes this step in the most unselfconscious way in the world.

[Notes for §111 here]

§112 While the prude, with the greatest punctiliousness, is concerned for her good reputation, will not be seen in public except with her mother or aunt, this girl, with her cheerful, lively, happy, mobile, prosaic, carefree, though good-natured and compassionate nature, lives in the freest intimacy with whoever happens to be her neighbor. She wakes him in the morning, cleans and tidies his room, cares for his laundry, lets him in return polish her floor, takes his arm on Sundays, and lets herself be led to dine at a restaurant or to the theater—or, if both are without money, they stroll together through the shop windows. Meanwhile she rejoices that she does honor to her friend in her dark-blue Levantine dress, her neat cap trimmed with lace and orange ribbons, her satin-turk boots, and the splendid shawl of bourre de soie that looks just like cashmere. She lets her neighbor fetch the shawl from her bed, pin it for her under her chemisette, invites him in the evenings, when he has nothing else to do, to read to her in her little room, calls him “little man,” and lets herself be called “little wife,” in short, she associates with him without reserve and in the most familiar manner. Thus she has gone on with Gireaudeau, Cabrion, Germain; with Rudolf she begins anew—and yet she has always preserved her innocence. She has preserved her innocence not because the mysterious flame of virtue burns in her breast—no, she makes no secret of it at all: because she has no time to fall in love. Rudolf asks: “What hinders the time to have a lover?” — “What hinders the time? Everything,” she answers. “First, I should be jealous as a tigress and torment myself with the most dreadful thoughts. Do I earn so much money that I can lose a couple of hours a day in lamenting and weeping? And if one deceived me—what tears! what grief! That would set me back endlessly. Still worse if he were too kind—could I then live a moment without him? And if he left me? Consider! Ah, I can’t imagine what all might happen to me. So much is certain—that my work would suffer under it, and what then would become of me? I can hardly now, when I am quite calm, earn all I need, though I work twelve to fifteen hours daily. How could I make up the time if I lost two days a week through sighing and lamenting? You see yourself, it cannot be,” she concludes. She takes no merit from it. She appeals to no mystery of virtue in her breast. Quite simply she explains: “I have not had leisure to be in love.” And when later, for the unhappy Germain, accused of theft and imprisoned, she feels no longer mere friendship but true and most intimate love, there hides behind her love not that mystery which keeps lovers unsatisfied in their love until they have conquered one another, until they lie each in the other’s arms. “I will not think of that,” she says to Rudolf. “This is certain: I will do for Germain all I can so long as he is in prison. When he is free, there will always be time enough to consider whether I feel love or friendship for him. If it is love, well, then let it be love. Until then, I will not trouble myself about it.” Her love is pure love, love without shame, for it is untroubled by romantic dreams that excite the blood—for those to whom the glow in the breast, the fire in the veins, is the mystery of love.

[Notes for §112 here]

§113 Laughter-Dove builds upon her health and youth, that is, upon herself. A foreign power she knows not, which could disturb her self-confidence. Therefore she is so cheerful and good-humored. When Rudolf admonishes her to think of the future, “if, for example, you should fall ill,” she laughs aloud and answers: “I—ill? At eighteen, with the life I lead, that is impossible. I rise at five o’clock, winter and summer, and go to bed at ten or eleven; I eat according to my appetite, which is not great, do not freeze, work all day, sing like a lark, sleep like a marmot, and am of a light and contented heart; I have the certainty that I shall never lack work—why then should I fall ill? That would be too droll.”

[Notes for §113 here]

§114 Indeed, it is not possible that she should fall ill or unhappy, since nothing has power over her. She is herself everything to herself. She therefore wishes for nothing—or at least nothing that deserves the name of wish. For what she wishes, the mantel for her fireplace, she will certainly obtain. “When?” she asks herself, and cheerfully answers: “I do not know, but I have set my mind upon having it, and it will happen, even if I must work longer into the night.” So she herself can and will fulfill her wish. The how is no mystery to her. She has to wait on no accident, no chance, no miracle—but only on her own pleasure, her own will.

[Notes for §114 here]

§115 Because the mystery in no way and in no form can gain power over her, it does not weigh upon her, nor lie heavy on her heart, when a friend entrusts her with something. “In earnest, neighbor,” she says firmly and resolutely to Rudolf when he asks her to tell him Germain’s address—she adjures him, in Germain’s own interest: “I believe that you wish Mr. Germain all good, but I had to give him my promise not to tell his address to anyone. I have promised it, and I will keep it.” She trusts Germain as she does herself; therefore she finds, so to speak, in his mystery nothing mysterious. To her it is nothing more than her promise.

[Notes for §115 here]

§116 Laughter-Dove’s budget proves that she is poor, yet she assists the unfortunate Morels with her savings, shares with them her simple meal, shortens herself in her only wealth—her time—in order to visit Louise and Germain in prison. But neither does she make ado about the great sacrifices she brings, nor is she ashamed of the relatively small services she can render her friends. She rates what she does neither higher nor lower than it is: a benefit shown to a distressed neighbor, a joy she thereby prepares for herself. And in the manner and way in which she comes to help, she lets herself be guided purely by her human feeling. Not invisibly, like an angel, does she appear and distribute her gift—no, she lends to the Morels. “It is not right,” she thinks, “to have three silver francs lying idle when honest people nearby are starving.” She lends them the money. “When I say I lent them the money,” she explains to Rudolf, “I did that only not to wound them, for I gave it to them with all my heart.” An angel would disdain the untruth, however small; she, the poor girl, will not “wound” the poor neighbors.

[Notes for §116 here]

§117 Rudolf promises her: “They will repay you, now that they have come into better circumstances.” She does not take long to answer: “I shall not refuse it either, for it will be a beginning for the vases I so much desire.” How little difficulty would it be for the angel to renounce so childish a wish, in order to surround himself with the mysterious semblance of disinterested charity.

[Notes for §117 here]

§118 But Laughter-Dove cares nothing for this semblance. She is clear and open, wholly human.

[Notes for §118 here]

§119 Therefore she is so lovely, charming, poetic. In her character is no fold, nothing hidden—neither a concealed virtue nor a whitewashed fault. As she is, so she shows herself; what she is, so she seems.

[Notes for §119 here]

§120 With the portrayal of a character like Laughter-Dove, infinitely much is gained. It is impossible to close oneself to the joy which this girl awakens in us with every step she takes, with every word she speaks. Who would now longer deny that, besides romantic extravagance, there can yet be another poetry!

[Notes for §120 here]

§121 This world of mysteries is now the general world-condition into which the individual action of The Mysteries of Paris is set, on which it rests, from which it arises, beyond which it develops, and which it itself strives to transform.

[Notes for §121 here]

§122 Before I pass to the philosophical reproduction of the epic event, I must here gather together into a total picture the individual outlines previously sketched.

[Notes for §122 here]

§123 It follows first from my exposition that the several mysteries discussed do not have their value in themselves, each isolated from the others—not as though they were grand scandalous anecdotes, in whose telling one passes without connection from one hundredth to one thousandth point—but rather in that they together form an organically articulated sequence whose totality is the Mystery as such.

[Notes for §123 here]

§124 To be sure, in our epic the mysteries do not appear in the relation of this self-conscious sequence. Yet we are not dealing here with the logical, openly manifest, free organism of critique, but with a mysterious plant-existence. The plant repeats its whole and complete organism in every new shoot that it brings forth, whereby it becomes possible to propagate it not only from seed but also from cuttings. The essential components that condition the life of the plant are found in every stem, in every leaf—only in a particular distribution, with the predominance of one or another element, whereby the special formation of stem and leaf is newly and fully brought about. Similarly stands the relation of the individual mysteries to one another—the mysteries which are the stems and leaves of one great rampant growth.

[Notes for §124 here]

§125 Thus crime is at the same time lawlessness: society punishes the criminal, it takes its right; but the right to which he might lay claim—to be educated and raised to a better life—it does not grant him. For it continues to tolerate “ignorance and poverty,” and these “lead the poor class to frightful human and social degradation.”

[Notes for §125 here]

§126 Society has, in general, no faith in the possibility that one who has once committed a crime could turn back and reform.

[Notes for §126 here]

§127 From Melun, where he had been imprisoned for pickpocketing, released, the Sneak—the storyteller in La Force—forms the laudable and firm resolve to earn his bread henceforth by an honest trade. Yet it remains that, from circumstances, nothing is left for him but to enter a white-lead factory, where he foresees the torments of lead colic and certain death within a few years. What a resolve—to wish to become an honest man in the face of pain and death—when he need only commit a petty theft, requiring not even the courage to face danger, in order to enjoy again in prison a carefree life, a life in society with like-minded men, where the contempt which outside meets the evil deed no longer strikes him sharply in the face—where rather, through special brutality or through the talent for telling moving tales, such as he possesses, he may even gain esteem! What a resolve, then! And how does society do him justice? He arrives at the site of the lead factory—but it stands still, for within a few years all the workers have perished. He seeks work among all the masters. But everywhere it is: “Away with the former convict! the thief! the coiner!” Wherever he is seen, people clutch their pockets. To escape starvation, he sets out for Paris, hoping there to find work. It is no wonder that pure chance makes a thief again of one who, misunderstood and condemned in his best intention, is driven back into prison.

[Notes for §127 here]

§128 Crime is further the external, criminal act of the individual, carnal, ignorant man—the man who stands under the dominion of his sensual impulses. This aspect is represented most particularly by the “Schurimann.” Early, as butcher’s boy and knacker’s helper, it is to him already a material enjoyment to kill—and even after his transformation by Rudolf, this lust for murder awakens once more.

[Notes for §128 here]

§129 Crime also dissembles. It would give itself the semblance of diabolical ferocity, while yet the spark of humanity remains alive and warmly felt even in the most degenerate nature. The matron in St. Lazarus thus draws, from long and intelligent observation, the conclusion that the imprisoned girls in general are less bad than they strive to appear—and she is right in this conclusion.

[Notes for §129 here]

§130 For example: a violent creature, called the “She-Wolf,” so fierce, bold, and bestial in her character, insults the worthy matron impudently before all the prisoners; yet in the solitude of sleep and dream two large tears roll down the cheeks of this girl with the iron brow, and she pleads: “Forgive! forgive! Madame Armand!” The next day, among her companions, she is again coarse and violent toward the same Madame Armand. Later, through the inexplicable influence of Fleur-de-Marie, the She-Wolf and her whole gang are prevented from cruelly abusing an unfortunate pregnant girl. In consequence, the She-Wolf accuses herself of cowardice, and believes herself therefore despicable, since the words “Death to the cowards,” which her lover Martial had burned into her arm with a red-hot needle, now, as she thinks, turn back upon herself. She cries out: “I could have strangled Mt. St. Jean when she said you (the matron) turned us from evil to good—for she had—to our shame—right.” Shame she calls it! Horrible hypocrisy of crime!

[Notes for §130 here]

§131 The dreadful skeleton in La Force boasts: “I would kill a man for six francs—for nothing—merely for the honor of it. People think I have killed only two persons, but if the dead could speak, five would bear witness how I work.”

[Notes for §131 here]

§132 “The robber bragged,” continues Eugène Sue, and adds:

[Notes for §132 here]

§133 “These bloodthirsty boasts are one of the characteristic marks of hardened criminals.”

[Notes for §133 here]

§134 “A prison director testified: if the alleged murders of which these unfortunates boast had really taken place, every tenth man would have been murdered.”

[Notes for §134 here]

§135 Finally, crime must also recognize its own impotence—whereby it does not, as it believes, mock God and the laws, but makes itself into a mockery. Through their deed the malefactors rebel against divine and worldly order, and yet the prisoners in St. Lazarus feel a certain awe and fear at the sight of the image of the Virgin and the votive offerings they themselves have made. The rogues and murderers, who proudly rely on their unbelief and brutality, yet require the consecrated twig in their cell as a mysterious charm and talisman for their hours of rest.

[Notes for §135 here]

§136 Thus the hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness of Ferrand likewise become a mockery of themselves. He would laugh at another in his situation—much less could it be for him, were he not already a mockery of himself, such a dreadful punishment that at the end of his life he must set the crown upon all his hypocrisies and win the coveted fruit, more precious than he ever dared hope—to die with a halo. Yet that he submits to this punishment may reconcile us to his hideous character. He proves thereby that he is still human. The devil tricked Rudolf and made him the instrument of his malice, while Ferrand, conversely, with his avarice for beneficence, his hatred for love—with his satanic qualities—is forced to serve humanity. At the same time hypocrisy and the self-mockery of crime reveal themselves also in the strange fact that most prisoners, in spite of their depravity, are almost always fond of naïve tales in which, according to the laws of an inexorable fate, the oppressed, after countless trials, is avenged upon his tyrant. “One need only follow the tale of the Sneak, Gringalet and Cut-in-Two, and observe with what passionate imprecations the malefactors pursue the villain, with what approving suspense they await the deliverance of the victim—and that at the very moment when they are plotting a bloody assault against a fellow prisoner, Germain.”

[Notes for §136 here]

§137 In self-mockery the Mystery pronounces its own judgment. It completes and destroys itself in its own completion. Ferrand feels himself utterly annihilated precisely because his hypocrisy—the art and glory of his life—has, beyond all expectation, completely fulfilled itself; because he finds himself forced, “while trembling with impotent rage, to earn the just praises of an honorable priest whom he had hitherto deceived.”

[Notes for §137 here]

§138 Thus the mysteries, which, living so inwardly as outwardly intertwined, form one mighty poisonous plant that overgrows and overspreads all our conditions and relations—climbing even to the prince, twining about his throne and coiling through his crown—thus these mysteries themselves call forth every vigorous character to independent testing. To such may we gain self-confidence and courage, since a simple girl, Laughter-Dove, without great exertion of strength, armed only with the power of her nature, advances happily and breathes freely and cheerfully where else all breasts are constricted and heads confused.

[Notes for §138 here]

§139 The world-condition of the mysteries of Paris, considered as an epic, is precisely the mystery itself. Indeed, it judges itself and dissolves within itself. But that with it not also the world itself should perish, men must arise who voluntarily impose upon themselves the penance which their age, ignorant and merely suffering, must endure passively—men who, as they penetrate destructively into the mysteries, no longer build the edifice of long-cherished hopes upon sand, but truly establish it upon the foundation. These are the men of relentless critique.

[Notes for §139 here]

§140 Rudolf is, in our epic, such a man.

[Notes for §140 here]

§141 His active penance is the core of the individual epic action of The Mysteries of Paris. He, the Prince of Gerolstein, is its bearer and first servant—the first servant of the state of humanity.

[Notes for §141 here]

§142 Yet Rudolf would fade into a mere idea, without the actuality and the characterful force of personality, or could not truly partake in that general penance, if he had not himself a grave guilt to atone for. This is the significant meaning of the thirteenth of January, the day on which Rudolf drew the sword against his father.

[Notes for §142 here]

§143 The father already rests in his princely tomb; Rudolf has succeeded him on the throne; yet the memory of the criminal deed will not come to rest. To it is bound the existence of a child, whose unworthy mother, the later Countess MacGregor, has shifted onto Rudolf the guilt of his life. Rudolf receives the news of the death of his child, and the suspicion that it may have been neglected by such a mother plants a new thorn in his heart, one that reopens the old wound—the wound of the thirteenth of January. Rudolf founds, from fear, the happiness of his subjects; the thirteenth of January the son cannot erase from his memory. Rudolf’s most faithful teacher, his most sincere friend, his most devoted servant, Murph, is at once the witness of that unblessed deed of the thirteenth of January—the one who restrained the arm in its parricidal intent.

[Notes for §143 here]

§144 But Murph is at once the eternalized guilt of the thirteenth of January and the eternal atonement of that guilt through incomparable love and self-sacrifice for the person of Rudolf.

[Notes for §144 here]

§145 In the true friend the friend finds himself again. This, in the richest and noblest sense, gives Murph his worth. The noble simplicity, the strength and composure of which Rudolf is capable—yet which, through his love for Sarah, he had unconsciously lost, until finally, on the thirteenth of January, the rupture decisively appeared—these sources of his nature, this goal of his life, are preserved for him pure and unclouded in Murph.

[Notes for §145 here]

§146 Murph is devotion itself toward Rudolf, because by serving him he dedicates his powers to humanity. Murph consecrates himself to humanity because he was first Rudolf’s teacher, then Rudolf’s friend. Rudolf and the salvation of mankind—Rudolf and the realization of the essential perfection of man—are for Murph one inseparable unity, a unity to which he devotes himself not with the foolish, doglike submission of a slave, but knowingly and independently.

[Notes for §146 here]

§147 Murph is therefore also Rudolf’s confidant and initiated into the plan of every enterprise, while Baron Graun and all the rest of Rudolf’s companions are, more or less, mere instruments.

[Notes for §147 here]

§148 Wherever Rudolf would stray, to one side or another, from the center in which he stands for Murph, there Murph keeps watch over him or resists him. Thus, disguised as a coal-carrier, he follows Rudolf against his will even to the tavern “At the White Rabbit,” because he believes him endangered among rogues, thieves, and murderers. Thus, too, Murph dares to reproach his master, as though Rudolf’s stay in the dens of crime were unworthy of him. And when Rudolf, provoked by contradiction, would again break out with the full violence of his temperament—even as once against his father—the faithful friend does not shrink from reminding him of the thirteenth of January, though he knows well what immense pain he thereby awakens.

[Notes for §148 here]

§149 Murph shields and guards Rudolf from every kind of self-forgetfulness: as much from that neglect of the individual self to which Rudolf’s noble nature is prone, as from that denial of the task of his life to which Rudolf’s irascible character drives him.

[Notes for §149 here]

§150 Murph is the complete counterpart to Laughter-Dove. Laughter-Dove is free and self-contented openness itself; Murph serves Rudolf that he may become clear and pure within himself. Laughter-Dove has no secret; Murph tolerates none. As Rudolf’s teacher, he develops the hidden germs of his splendid nature that they may later become manifest in mind and body. As Rudolf’s friend, he devotes himself with body and soul to Rudolf’s penance, that it may be transformed from a secret, consuming sorrow into a gladdening deed.

[Notes for §150 here]

§151 Laughter-Dove stands on the outermost boundary of the mysteries. She is not conscious of her own high moral worth; therefore she remains to herself still a mystery. Murph, by contrast, is completely at peace with himself concerning what he strives for. Yet for him it is still only Rudolf—Rudolf as the one who accomplishes the task of personal atonement—who alone is capable of solving all the riddles of the world. Murph indeed lifts the veil from the mysteries, but only for Rudolf’s sake. He helps in the work of destroying the power of the mysteries, yet he still lacks the unshakable conviction that this struggle is necessary and can succeed. He can still believe that it is an unworthy undertaking for his master and friend Rudolf, the sovereign prince, to mingle among criminals.

[Notes for §151 here]

§152 Laughter-Dove and Murph thus, as it were, reach out their hands to one another—she, cheerful and bright, emerging from the dark background of the mysteries; he, devoting his strength to beneficent, world-transforming action, self-conscious, mastering a whirlpool of events, serious, almost sombre, moving into the dark region of the mysteries, which remain to him riddles and clouds, though he so often helps to tear the mists apart.

[Notes for §152 here]

§153 Rudolf has raised the sword against his father.

[Notes for §153 here]

§154 As penance for the guilt he has thereby taken upon himself, he undertakes a great journey and sets himself almost the same task as that of the renewed Order of the Swan: namely, to alleviate physical and moral suffering “wherever he finds it.”

[Notes for §154 here]

§155 As infinitely valuable and consequential as this idea of the Order of the Swan may be, yet when brought into connection with Rudolf’s guilt it appears as a wholly illogical, capricious notion of one who indeed has the power for such notions. It is not evident how a sin committed against the blessed father could be atoned for by acts of mercy among beggars and savages. Moreover, by this journey Rudolf withdraws from his country the presence of its sovereign and delivers it into the by no means desirable situation of a prolonged regency.

[Notes for §155 here]

§156 What is needed here is an unprejudiced penetration into Rudolf’s character, the nature of his guilt, and the thought of his penance.

[Notes for §156 here]

§157 Rudolf seeks, as he has sinned personally against the person of his father, to make atonement by becoming a benefactor of human society.

[Notes for §157 here]

§158 But can so disproportionately great a work arise from so comparatively slight a beginning and occasion? His hand, raised in anger, had not even fallen upon the dear head of the father. The deed which, had it been accomplished, must have embittered Rudolf’s life through all its duration and to the grave, was not done. At the right moment a favorable fate sent the friend to stay the arm—to make the deed undone.

[Notes for §158 here]

§159 Here we find the key: the intervention of Murph. That Rudolf, through the favor of fate, did not truly become a parricide—this is the source of the stream of his penance.

[Notes for §159 here]

§160 By what has he deserved this infinite favor—this unjust favor? Is he not already overwhelmed with good fortune? By birth placed in a position which will one day lay the highest earthly power, the sovereign power of a prince, at his feet, he has at his disposal all material and spiritual treasures. Beside him stands the man born in poverty and lowliness, who must neglect heart and mind to prolong his life, cripple himself in toil, and be driven by need to crime. By what has Rudolf deserved the immense distance between himself and such a man? Has he earned it by the worthy use of his noble birth?—He has renounced a faithful teacher, followed the counsels of a vile man, fastened his heart upon a woman without heart or conscience, and lifted the deadly stroke against his father. The murderer should expect the same lot on the scaffold as every murderer; but Rudolf, who through fate’s favor of education and clear consciousness of right and wrong stands above others—a murderer from mere wrathful passion—deserves a far harsher punishment than the murderer from hunger and despair.

[Notes for §160 here]

§161 But oh, the superabundance of fortune that heaps itself upon him! Rudolf, with the same, indeed with the more guilty intent, is yet not made an actual murderer. Not that he himself has come to his senses—no, the favor of fate sends at the right hour the friend.

[Notes for §161 here]

§162 What bows Rudolf down and threatens to crush him is the enormous, unjust favor of destiny. The very act prevented swells into a gigantic guilt for him, which he feels irresistibly compelled to expiate.

[Notes for §162 here]

§163 Pressed by the consciousness of this guilt, constrained by the undeserved privilege, Rudolf conceives the thought of pure critique. And this thought is more fruitful for him and for humanity than all the experiences which mankind has made in its history, than all the knowledge that Rudolf, guided even by the most faithful teacher, could acquire from that history.

[Notes for §163 here]

§164 It is the power of critique which drives Rudolf forth, assigning to him the task “to reward the good, to pursue the evil, to aid the suffering, and to examine all wounds, in order perhaps to rescue some souls from ruin.”

[Notes for §164 here]

§165 The power of critique arms him with the earnest, unshakable will to fulfill this task. It makes him cast off the indolence and comfort that otherwise cleave to the individual; it lets him discover and develop the wealth of forces which human nature contains within itself; it lets him reach his true destiny.

[Notes for §165 here]

§166 The power of critique gives him the courage to cast away all prejudices—the courage to set his princely foot in taverns and garrets, to shrink not from contact with crime and misery, the courage to cultivate unembarrassed moral companionship with a grisette. To her he is the cheerful and tender neighbor. To the Pipelets he is “the king of the tenants”; to the Morels he is the modest clerk who acts in the name of a philanthropic lady. At the ball of the ambassador he is prince. To the Marquise de Harville he is at once unreserved and yet considerate friend: he gives her back to herself; he offers her his hand; he renounces her; he seeks as husband consolation in her. To the schoolmaster and Jacob Ferrand he is the terrible angel of vengeance. To Fleur-de-Marie he is the loving father even before he knows that he is her father in the flesh. — But who would undertake, in few words, to summarize the richness into which Rudolf’s character unfolds once it has found its center, through his infinitely numerous and varied relations?

[Notes for §166 here]

§167 If Rudolf thereby assumes the most manifold roles, these are not unworthy masquerades; on the contrary, he only lays aside the great mask that fate, through birth, has imposed upon him, in order to bring forth the pure man unimpeded in every condition and relation.

[Notes for §167 here]

§168 He who is capable of setting himself in earnest the task “to examine all wounds” has, in this very will, also gained the courage and strength to see all wounds. Rudolf does not remain upon his lofty standpoint, because he knows that, seen from there, the world appears in strange perspective. He does not shrink from the labor of freely taking the standpoints to the right and to the left, above and below, that by learning to know the world wholly, he may thereby also develop himself into the whole man. He who lets himself be wedged fast in the narrow circle where chance has placed him, wedged into the narrow crevice of his occupation and condition, remains through his life nothing but a fragment, a broken piece of that which nature intended him to be when she brought him forth from a woman’s womb.

[Notes for §168 here]

§169 The power of critique teaches Rudolf to regard the immense possession of material and moral goods into which he has been placed by the fortune of birth, without his own effort or labor, not as a right but as a grace of destiny; it teaches him to know himself thereby indebted and obligated to humanity; it teaches him, finally, to discover the mystery—the mystery of all mysteries—to set himself a worthy goal and to attain it.

[Notes for §169 here]

§170 True, the poet does not lead us directly to the starting point and source from which Rudolf’s beneficent actions pour forth upon society. He ought to have done so, lest the sluggish and drowsy reader find the excuse that an exceedingly interesting but unattainable ideal has been set before him. Unattainable for the less fortunate than Rudolf are the results, not the beautiful goal which, before the eye that can see clearly through the purified atmosphere, will rise of itself. The power by which he has become free will, through this simple labor, in everyone grow to unimagined heights; through it he will gain a worth incomparably greater than if he remained through life a mere fraction of birth, a fragment in his one-sided position. — Yet it results from the whole, as from every part of The Mysteries of Paris, that Eugène Sue has based his epic, and especially its central character, upon that worldview whose first condition is free examination of the existing order and calm judgment concerning it. Moreover, the passages with which he interrupts the narration, introduces and concludes episodes, are very numerous, and all are critique.

[Notes for §170 here]

§171 Should one nevertheless refuse to recall them and accuse me of imagining them into the poet’s work and at his expense, still my task itself requires that I now show by examples how Rudolf exercises this critique upon others, and thereby unmistakably points back to the thorough self-critique which must have preceded its results. The impartial tribunal by which Rudolf immortalizes his course through the world is, in truth, nothing else than

[Notes for §171 here]

§172 The Unveiling of the Mysteries of Society.

[Notes for §172 here]

§173 Rudolf is not too noble and refined to penetrate into the mysteries of the people, nor too considerate and self-conscious to remain blind to the mysteries of the cultivated society.

[Notes for §173 here]

§174 The first person whom Rudolf encounters upon his journey through the world—at the point where the poet first introduces him to us—is the Schurimann, as he is brutally mistreating a poor, pretty girl. Rudolf steps between them and overcomes the Schurimann by letting a hail of blows rain down upon his head.

[Notes for §174 here]

§175 The murderer, next to the schoolmaster himself the most feared among his kind, far from being provoked to greater bitterness by the cuffs of his conqueror, rather submits to him without resentment, indeed with reverence for these quite extraordinary blows upon the head.

[Notes for §175 here]

§176 In this savage—who, when once slaughtering an animal, never entertained the remotest thought of murder or mortal agony, who therein merely satisfied a wholly material need with a sort of carnal pleasure—in this Schurimann the moral qualities have as yet so little developed out of their bodily husk, have worked themselves so little free from their natural basis into independence, that the stunning physical blow which the Schurimann receives from Rudolf upon the head becomes at the same time an electric shock that subjects the savage to the dispenser of such blows also in a moral sense. From that moment the Schurimann acknowledges Rudolf as his lord and master and gives himself over to him.

[Notes for §176 here]

§177 In the tale of the Weeper there already flashes forth, from the Schurimann’s merely sensuous nature, the native noble indignation against the abominable Owl. From his own narrative it then becomes clear that these so terribly corporeal forces and capacities are nevertheless through and through already moral powers: he, who has committed a murder, abhors theft and robbery as utterly contrary to his nature. The Schurimann has long been a moral being—only he does not know it; the association with rogues, thieves, and robbers, whom he himself despises and among whom he has nevertheless been thrust out, rather recalls to his memory at every moment that he is not one of those civilized, honorable beings who will not tolerate him in their company.

[Notes for §177 here]

§178 But Rudolf examines, recognizes, and says to him: “Thou still hast a heart and a sense of honor!”—says Rudolf, his master, from whom he has received the blows upon his head, to which he can look back only with a feeling in which admiration, fear, and respect flow together. Then it must be an unshakable truth. Because Rudolf has said to him, “Thou hast a heart and a sense of honor,” therefore he now has heart and honor in his body. He believes in it; he knows himself to be a moral being, and therefore he is henceforth a moral being. This his whole new life attests, even unto death—it bears witness to it in touching, self-sacrificing, heroic fashion, indeed at last with full self-consciousness of his worth.

[Notes for §178 here]

§179 What a merit Rudolf thereby acquires—to have given the Schurimann back to humanity.

[Notes for §179 here]

§180 Yet while Rudolf calls to the Schurimann, “Thou still hast a heart and a sense of honor!”, he blinds, on the other hand, the Schoolmaster.

[Notes for §180 here]

§181 The Schoolmaster once belonged to cultivated society; he therefore knows that in his individual, bodily existence he is a universal being, belonging to humanity. But he denies this through his whole deceitful and criminal conduct. He has torn himself violently away from his better self and from human society.

[Notes for §181 here]

§182 Those bonds by which he is first connected with humanity—those to woman and child—are for him without binding power; he needs not even to break them, for they have from the beginning been to him no bridge toward improvement and perfection, but have served only to chain those unfortunate beings cruelly to himself, that he might squander their possessions and compel them to commit fraud and theft for his benefit, as he demands of his son—Franz Germain. With all other men he is connected not through a loving, human heart, but in that he can use them as playthings of his covetous will, shatter and murder them in order to rob them. Thus he has also estranged himself from the powers of human nature in his own head and breast; he is no longer one with them; he does not feel himself nothing without them, but his individual, carnal existence is lord over them; reason and will are slaves of the body, and he employs them for the invention and execution of his accursed designs. Indeed, the consequence of the complete sundering of the purely sensuous, perishable, pleasure-seeking, egoistic existence from the universal, eternal, self-denying essence drives him even to inconsistency—namely, to mutilate this body, his king, for whose sake he has murdered and robbed, for whose sake he has sacrificed men and mankind.

[Notes for §182 here]

§183 This man is delivered into Rudolf’s hands. According to his task, Rudolf must punish him.

[Notes for §183 here]

§184 But punishment strikes me only destructively when I recognize its justice—when this recognition grows so powerful within me that I pronounce sentence upon myself. Punishment, therefore, can be nothing else than the means—not merely of rendering harmless and deterring—but first of raising the criminal to be judge over his own crime.

[Notes for §184 here]

§185 To a man like the Schoolmaster, then, the task of punishment is to show and prove that he has not yet succeeded in severing himself entirely from the essence of man, that the general, spiritual, invisible powers of his nature still hold power over him. Law, on the other hand, exercises only retribution; it punishes physical murder with physical death. The murderer ends by revolting even against the cowardice of human society, which, all against one, steps into the lists and then of course overcomes him. He does not come to conviction of the superiority of the moral essence, because he no longer feels it within his own breast.

[Notes for §185 here]

§186 Rudolf now calls back into the Schoolmaster the consciousness that there is, within him as without him, still a higher power above his individual, malignant, egoistic will; he draws this power forth from the mysteries beneath which the Schoolmaster had buried it alive—by having him blinded and at the same time bestowing upon him a small fortune, so that a life free from want is assured to him. Behold! Suddenly the Schoolmaster feels, most painfully, not a bodily anguish—no, for he does not even believe it when they tell him he has been deprived of the light of his eyes, so swiftly and so painlessly has the cruel operation been performed upon him—he feels, rather, the lack of all moral support, that support which his whole life has been bent on destroying: To whom shall he entrust himself, since he can no longer rely upon himself? “They will rob me,” is his first thought.

[Notes for §186 here]

§187 Then the Schurimann, taking pity on him, proves to him that he (the Schoolmaster) has succeeded only in dehumanizing himself, not in killing human feeling altogether. And the dreadful Schoolmaster is convinced; he suddenly recognizes the power of honesty and uprightness, saying to the Schurimann: “Yes, I can trust thee; thou hast never stolen.” He comes further to consciousness through his terrible dream—that his better part within him is awake and alive. Over against it he must feel that his enormous bodily strength is powerless and vain. Therefore is fulfilled what Rudolf had foretold him: “Thou shalt tremble before the weakest!” He trembles before a woman, the Owl; he trembles before a child, the little cripple.

[Notes for §187 here]

§188 Nevertheless, with the Schoolmaster no such swift and happy transformation can take place as with the Schurimann. What in the latter is a glorious awakening and blossoming is in the former a forced acknowledgment, against which he continues to struggle.

[Notes for §188 here]

§189 Ferrand sprang from the great family of the avaricious. “Unheard of, however, is it that a miser, in order to increase his fortune, should go so far as to commit crime—nay, even murder. The miser is weak, timid, sly, mistrustful, chiefly prudent and cautious, never rash, indifferent to the sufferings of his neighbor, but he does not himself cause them. The word venture is not to be found in the miser’s vocabulary.”

[Notes for §189 here]

§190 “In this sense Jacob Ferrand was a remarkable exception, for Jacob Ferrand ventured, and ventured much.”

[Notes for §190 here]

§191 “He counted upon his hypocrisy.”

[Notes for §191 here]

§192 To the double shell of piety and rectitude with which the notary had encased himself there corresponds a double core: he is not only vicious and passionate—that is, avaricious and voluptuous—but he also shrinks from no crime that may serve to gratify his greed and his lust.

[Notes for §192 here]

§193 He becomes a criminal toward Louise Morel and thereby, all unsuspecting, falls into Rudolf’s hands.

[Notes for §193 here]

§194 Rudolf’s task is to compel his confession—that is, to turn his inner kernel outward. He accomplishes it by pressing the outer shell inward—that is, by bringing the Ferrand as he appears and the Ferrand as he is into conflict with one another, thus forcing him to judge himself.

[Notes for §194 here]

§195 He brings Ferrand into contact with Cecily, one of those almost deadly dark-skinned girls for Europeans, “those magical vampires who intoxicate their victim with dreadful delight, suck from him the last drop of money and blood, and leave him nothing but his tears for drink and his heart for gnawing.”

[Notes for §195 here]

§196 “Hear me,” says Ferrand to Cecily, “hear me!—If I were to lay here, at this instant, in your hand, my honor, my fortune, my life—would you then believe that I love you? If I were to confide to you a secret that could bring me to the scaffold—would you then be mine?—My austerity of morals—lie! My honesty—lie! My piety—lie! Wilt thou have my head for thy caresses?”

[Notes for §196 here]

§197 Rudolf has achieved his end: Ferrand would seem only what he is.

[Notes for §197 here]

§198 No, says Rudolf, thou shalt not seem what thou art. That shall be thy punishment.

[Notes for §198 here]

§199 Ferrand is sick and wretched. Almost continually he is shaken by a nervous trembling that at times rises to convulsive spasms; his fleshless hands are hot and dry; the large green spectacles conceal his bloodshot eyes, from which gleams the uncanny fire of a consuming fever.

[Notes for §199 here]

§200 But Ferrand replies to the compassionate Abbé: “I give you my assurance that my condition is not so alarming as you believe.”

[Notes for §200 here]

§201 Ferrand hates his accomplice already for being his accomplice. He regards it as his greatest fault that he must have one at all. And now this man is his very executioner. Him he must call his “friend.”

[Notes for §201 here]

§202 Those whom he has ruined—whom he has morally murdered—he must indemnify, and in doing so he must be hypocritical with his benefactions; he must speak of an “unknown person,” must ascribe to her the credit for his good deeds.

[Notes for §202 here]

§203 In short, “Rudolf tortures the voluptuary through voluptuousness, the miser through avarice, the hypocrite through hypocrisy.”

[Notes for §203 here]

§204 Rudolf brings it simply to the point that Polidori, in uttering the words, “I venture to say it in the presence of the Abbé—you are your own executioner, poor friend!”—speaks the simple truth.

[Notes for §204 here]

§205 Rudolf stands, after the confession of Louise Morel has driven her father to madness, sunk in bitter thought:

[Notes for §205 here]

§206 “Nothing is more common than the seduction to which the maid is subjected by her master—with greater or lesser violence—now through fear, now through surprise, now through the very nature of the relations themselves which service brings about.

[Notes for §206 here]

§207 “This corruption of morals by command, which descends from the rich to the poor, and profanes the sacred inviolability of the domestic hearth—this moral corruption, which is always deplorable even when entered into voluntarily, appears dreadful when it is forced.

[Notes for §207 here]

§208 “What consequences for the woman! Almost always humiliation, misery, prostitution, theft—sometimes even infanticide!

[Notes for §208 here]

§209 “And for this the laws have provided no remedy. Every accomplice in a crime bears the punishment of that crime; the receiver of stolen goods is regarded as equal to the thief—and rightly so; but when a man, out of arrogance, in idleness, seduces a young, innocent, pure girl, makes her a mother, casts her into shame, into misfortune, into despair—perhaps even drives her to infanticide, to a crime for which she must atone with her life—is he considered her accomplice? Oh no. And what is it, then? Nothing, less than nothing, a flirtation, a passing fancy for a pretty girl who will turn tomorrow to another. ‘The man is entirely within his rights,’ when he says: ‘There exists no law that forbids a man to make a blonde a mother and then abandon her for a brunette. I have but exercised an inalienable right which society accords to man.’”

[Notes for §209 here]

§210 Thus thinks Rudolf. And now hold these thoughts up against your fantasies of the emancipation of woman.

[Notes for §210 here]

§211 The deed of this emancipation is in them almost tangible, while you, being by nature far too practical, have so often failed with your mere attempts.

[Notes for §211 here]

§212 Rudolf, on the contrary, does not attempt; but when his thought enters into life, it is a happy resolution.

[Notes for §212 here]

§213 Father Chatelain, overseer of the estate, relates to the Schoolmaster—who, as a poor, unhappy blind man, comes to Bouqueval—the plan which Rudolf followed in the establishment of the model farm. He says: “One day our master said to himself: I am rich; good. But for that I cannot eat twice; what if I were to give food to those who have none, and give better food to honest folk than they can themselves obtain? Yes, yes, that will be good; so then, quickly to work. He bought the estate here.” A much-used road, in very bad condition, led from here to Ecouen; but the more it must have been in everyone’s interest to see it repaired, the more obstinately each refused to labor upon it or to contribute money for its mending. Our master, who saw this, said: “The road shall be built; but since those who ought to contribute will give nothing, since it is in a sense a luxury road, it shall one day indeed benefit those who have horses and carriages, but first those who have only their two arms, the will to work, but no work. Thus, if a sturdy man knocks here and says: I am hungry, but I have no work, he shall receive this answer: here is a good soup, a spade, and a shovel; you shall be led to the road toward Ecouen; repair each day two rods of it, and in the evening you shall have forty sous; if you do not work, you shall receive nothing.”

[Notes for §213 here]

§214 “After our master had thus conceived what he calls work-alms, he thought further: People do for rogues what they do not for honest men; they improve the cattle, but not mankind. I know well, said he, that honest people find their reward up above—but up above! Where are they to find time to look thither? All day they must bend over the earth, from morning till night, digging and turning it for a master. After such labor, is their bread less black, their bed less hard, their children less weakly, their wives less exhausted with feeding them?—feeding the child, when she can scarcely still her own hunger? No, no! The poor would perhaps bear their fate with joy if they believed it fell equally upon all. But they go into the town when market is there, and there they see white bread, thick, warm, soft beds, children blooming like roses in May, so well-fed that they give cake to the dogs. Then the poor think: since there must be rich and poor, why were we not born to wealth? That is unjust. Why does not everyone take his turn? Most who labor for wages say and think: why should we work better or more? Whether the ear be heavy or light, it is all one to me. Why should we toil and sweat? We will remain honest, yes; the wicked are punished, therefore we will do no evil; but the good are not rewarded—why, then, should we do good? These, thought our master, these must be improved, just as though they had the honor to be horses, oxen, or sheep. It must be so arranged that they have an interest in being industrious, active, intelligent, instructed, and faithful; it must be proved to them that they are materially better off when they become better men—and all will gain thereby. After our master had well considered his plan, he announced in the neighborhood that he needed six farmhands and as many maidservants; but he would select these from among the best, according to the testimonials he could obtain from the mayors, the clergy, or others. They were to be paid as we are—that is, as princes—receive better fare than townsfolk, and divide among them one-fifth of the total yield; they were to remain two years upon the estate, and then make room for others chosen in the same manner; after five years those who had formerly served might return if places were free. Since this arrangement, all the farmhands, maidservants, and day-laborers in the district say: we will be diligent, honest, and industrious; we will distinguish ourselves by our good conduct, that we may one day obtain a place on the estate at Bouqueval; there we shall live for two years as in paradise, perfect ourselves in our calling, save a handsome sum, and thereafter be gladly received everywhere, for none come from there who are not excellent. Everyone gains thereby; the tenants in the neighborhood have a double advantage; there are but twelve positions to be given, yet perhaps fifty persons in the district strive for them; and why should those who cannot be received for that reason cease to be upright? For he who is not admitted once may hope for it next time—in short, many more honest people will be formed.”

[Notes for §214 here]

§215 One sees at first glance in the whole plan that it is no Utopia. Rudolf, through his model farm, truly forms many more honest people.

[Notes for §215 here]

§216 Yet it is not only among the poor and the lower classes that there is need for cultivation and betterment.

[Notes for §216 here]

§217 The Marquise of Harville is unhappy—not because the world and life do not bend to her wilful little head, to her individual fancy; no, the poet has shown us a delicate being who feels herself wounded and deceived not merely in what is dearest to her, but in the dearest and most essential thing that the earth can offer a woman at all. Her father has forgotten and broken his faith toward a mother whom she rightly adores, for the sake of a contemptible, scheming woman, one by no means of high intellect or cultivation. She herself, in consequence of her zeal to unmask this hypocrite—whom she is soon to be forced to honor as a mother—is, as it were, cast off by her father. The husband to whom she has given herself, body and soul, has taken her for wife solely from the selfish motive—she must recognize it in dreadful clarity already on the bridal night—of receiving love, not of giving it in return. How could he, afflicted as he is by a horrible disease, think even for a moment of pouring out love upon another being in the intimate relation which marriage demands? She must believe that he has married a nurse—and with her, a vessel for his desire. Even as mother, in this most unselfish of all feelings, the Marquise sees herself most deeply humiliated, indeed destroyed: she has borne beneath her heart and brought into the world a being who by its very life must be unhappy itself and make others so; her daughter has inherited her father’s disease.

[Notes for §217 here]

§218 Thus she stands—daughter, wife, and mother—deceived in all that gives woman the need and courage to rise to the purity of the truly human essence, thrust back from her goal upon her individual life, which cannot suffice her. She finds herself almost driven to egoism. And though she never ceases bravely to struggle, she is yet not only near succumbing, she does indeed succumb. Not her greatest fault is that in which she seems farthest removed from her noble nature—that she is on the point of hearkening to the commandant Karl Robert. On the contrary, it is through the compassion she feels for the melancholy young man that she seeks to tear herself loose from the egoism which misfortune has allowed to gain the upper hand in her heart. What draws her toward Karl Robert, then, is not the self-indulgent, romantic love which leads the Duchess of Lucenay into the arms of a St. Remy.

[Notes for §218 here]

§219 By far more does the Marquise of Harville surrender the fine equilibrium of her charming nature through the bitter, ironic manner she has accustomed herself to adopt toward her father, whom she almost despises for his weakness before the flattering but mindless Madame Roland—and most of all through her unjust judgment of her husband. In truth, she misjudges him, as he proves most decisively by his suicide, to which, indeed, the final conviction brings him—that the love of his noble wife as wife can never be his portion, even though through the noble Rudolf he has won and been granted in her a loving friend and sister. I say, this crushing conviction has indeed helped impel him to self-destruction—but more surely still the thought of freeing the adored woman, whom he has only lately learned fully to value, through the conversation between Rudolf and herself, which he has eavesdropped upon in jealous suspicion, from the cruel fetters of his wretched existence.

[Notes for §219 here]

§220 To guide the current of the Marquise of Harville’s thoughts and feelings back into the channel of her beautiful nature, Rudolf directs her to the entertaining side of beneficence—a thought which testifies to a knowledge of mankind that could arise only from the tried and inwardly purified soul of Rudolf himself.

[Notes for §220 here]

§221 The need of diversion is deeply rooted in human nature. Language itself makes man a social being to whom the self alone cannot suffice. No wonder, then, that we see the idle from morning till night in pursuit of entertainment. But, as with everything that has its root in human nature, this root strives to deny itself and to tear free from its basis; thus the confusion of life, in this ungrateful endeavor, lags not behind science and art. Entertainment believes itself to find its content and its end within itself. It forgets the source whence alone the sap and strength can flow to it, and withers into the dry instrument for killing time.

[Notes for §221 here]

§222 From the empty meaninglessness of the salons a being such as the Marquise of Harville can only recoil. Yet as much as she seeks at home—in father, in husband, in friendship and in love—the other self for that dialogue and communion which she does not yet know, but toward which she feels an irresistible impulse, she has always, through misapprehension and deception, been hurled back into the monologue of her unhappy self.

[Notes for §222 here]

§223 Thereupon Rudolf points her toward communion through beneficence; he shows her “that the heart can divert itself in very different ways. The means through which one reaches good or evil,” he says, “are often much the same; the end alone is different. To put it briefly—why should one prefer evil when good is just as attractive, just as entertaining?”

[Notes for §223 here]

§224 The Marquise of Harville grasps the new prospect for the satisfaction of her heart and begins a happier existence.

[Notes for §224 here]

§225 Rudolf does not abase his personal inclination toward his friend’s wife by a confession of love into a romantic relation, but elevates it to that divine love which makes happy without any thought of reward, in that he rescues the Marquise from a dishonoring step and the blood-stained vengeance of her husband connected therewith—and, what is more, raises her up again into the pure, unselfish, loving being that she once had been upon the bosom of her excellent mother.

[Notes for §225 here]

§226 In the Marquise of Harville, then, Rudolf prepares and achieves for himself the last and fairest—the imperishable reward of his deeds upon this earth: on the day of the burial of the Fleur-de-Marie, he is not alone.

[Notes for §226 here]

§227 The course of my exposition demands that only at its conclusion does Fleur-de-Marie find her place.

[Notes for §227 here]

§228 For if, following the unfolding of the objective world-condition, I have appended the indication of the guiding thought which took possession of Rudolf and through him set the special epic action in motion; if, as bearers and servants of the mysteries of that world-condition, I have been compelled in part to introduce quite other persons and characters than those upon whom I could later elucidate and prove Rudolf’s working, this could give occasion to the erroneous supposition that Eugène Sue has even separated the presentation of the objective groundwork from the development of the acting individual forces—which can be comprehended only from that background—in the manner in which our great Schiller separates Wallenstein’s Camp from Wallenstein’s Death, something that may perhaps be more justifiable for drama than for epic.

[Notes for §228 here]

§229 World-condition and epic event would still not be artistically joined into a truly single whole, if they merely crossed each other in a motley mixture, now here a piece of world-condition and then there a scene of action alternating with one another. If real unity is to arise, then both, the mysteries of this ensnared world, and the clarity, openness, and security with which Rudolf penetrates into them and unveils them, must collide and unite within one individual and character, and, united, make up the blood of a rich life flowing out from the heart and back to the heart.

[Notes for §229 here]

§230 Fleur-de-Marie has this task in our epic.

[Notes for §230 here]

§231 The world-condition, when it is to concentrate itself in the individual character, can, as the universal of the present, stand only on the side of the stronger, ruling principle in this character. That, therefore, which must present itself to the character of Fleur-de-Marie—if she is to fulfill her vocation in the artwork—as the ground always receding from beneath her, is the mystery.

[Notes for §231 here]

§232 Fleur-de-Marie thus also forms the direct antithesis to Rudolf. Rudolf’s guilt is personal, which he is in a position to discharge because he knows it, because he knows what infinite treasure and wealth of powers birth and destiny have entrusted to him, so that he, in order to be worthy of them, afterwards acquires this merit. Fleur-de-Marie unknowingly bears the general guilt of the time, the guilt of the mystery, which for her becomes the unfathomable, oppressive mystery of guilt. Without examination and judgment she is convinced that she bears it justly and deservedly. Although individually the openness of innocence itself, yet she must go under to the general guilt. To Rudolf the 13th of January stands eternally present and before his eyes, but with the principle of the future, which he wishes to create and does create, he overcomes the present, however mightily it may step forth. The guilt of Fleur-de-Marie is not her deed, by which she might find the measure to test this guilt and at the same time her powers, not her deed but her memory, the past which will never be effaced. In slavery at the hostess’s of the White Rabbit it is the remembrance of the parentless, sorrowful youth which she had to spend with La Chouette, physically and morally abused. In Bouqueval it is the remembrance of humiliation and shame in the fellowship of criminals. In Saint-Lazare and later it is the remembrance of the contempt of the farmer’s wife, Madame Dubreuil, which Fleur-de-Marie, once touched by the pest-breath of vice, lets sink into her with quiet sad resignation as something deserved. In Gerolstein, as the beloved, adored, blessed princess, it is the remembrance of the glance of the hostess at the White Rabbit, which struck her at the leave-taking from Paris and the beginning of a wholly new existence. Fleur-de-Marie dies with the remains of her little rosebush in her hands folded upon her breast, she dies with the remembrance of all the remembrances of her life: in this rosebush, which once, a bondswoman of disgrace, she led about like a solicitous mother her child, so that in the pure air it might strengthen its sickly existence—in this rosebush her whole life is concentrated, her transient innocent being in the midst of an eternal, unforgettable guilt. Her last breath is therefore also the plea for pardon, forgiveness! And yet personally there is nothing to forgive her. Inwardly pure, as seldom a human being, she falls asleep out of this world.

[Notes for §232 here]

§233 Fleur-de-Marie bears the guilt of the time and is crushed by it, without herself having part in it. Rudolf expiates the guilt of the time because he has to free himself from a heavy guilt of his own.

[Notes for §233 here]

§234 According to logical sequence, Rudolf would have to be the son of Fleur-de-Marie; but that is a new mystery, that the present, out of its own womb, often brings forth instead of the future the long-departed past. But such a child then has no future; it bears the germ of death in its young existence and dies like Fleur-de-Marie, at the very moment when it is to be permitted to unfold the whole wondrous splendor of its blossom. Fleur-de-Marie withers and sinks into the dust, Rudolf, however, the trunk which has struck deep roots into the soil of the present, will raise himself up again: he stands not alone. The child dies, the father lives. The father opens the way for the children, and what they will accomplish rests upon his shoulders. The child, if it does not in turn become father or mother, but descends maidenly and innocent into the grave, is nothing but a touching farewell which transience takes of the eternal further-development of human nature in new and ever new generations.

[Notes for §234 here]

§235 But this child is essentially a daughter. In her the suffering principle of womanhood is heightened to infinite passion. If therefore Fleur-de-Marie does not give herself to the love of a noble youth worthy of her, this refusal proceeds, on the one hand, from her sorrowful remembrances, with which she would bring no other being, least of all a beloved one, into contact; on the other hand, Fleur-de-Marie, in order entirely to correspond to the idea which she embodies in our epic, must never become a mother. The woman who becomes a mother gives up her passivity; she henceforth belongs, caring, acting, and creating, to the future, whereas Fleur-de-Marie has the task, as it were, to represent the last tear of melancholy which the past weeps before its total departure.

[Notes for §235 here]

§236 Though what has just been said already shows why precisely only a feminine being can bring this last conclusion of the past to appearance, it will become still clearer if we set Germain over against Fleur-de-Marie.

[Notes for §236 here]

§237 Germain is torn from his mother as Fleur-de-Marie from her father. Both bear the guilt of others. But Germain flees this guilt because he knows it; he warns his principal, whom, at his father’s, the dreadful schoolmaster’s, command, he is to betray and rob. Fleur-de-Marie is ashamed of the guilt which she herself has not committed, and of which she also does not know who through it has sinned against her. Fleur-de-Marie only suffers, Germain also suffers, but at the same time rebels. Upon Fleur-de-Marie the whole world weighs, because her guilt is her mystery; Germain has to contend with an evil fate. To overcome the same succeeds for him with the assistance of others. For Fleur-de-Marie, though prince and church, though the blessing of all the world enter the lists, the remembrance of disgrace and shame cannot be rolled off her breast. If Fleur-de-Marie represents the past, Germain is wholly a creature of the present. As the latter bows him down or lends him a hand, so his courage wanes and grows; but neither has the past given him, as it has Fleur-de-Marie, the eternal impulse, the inextinguishable coloring for the whole life, nor is he himself, like Rudolf, the living spring that may grow and swell into the mighty stream into the future. He is, as the times bring with them, the melancholy neighbor and the happy husband of Rigolette.

[Notes for §237 here]

§238 But not only over against Rudolf and Germain, rather over against everyone, does Fleur-de-Marie form the most decided antithesis. All mysteries can all be unveiled: Rudolf makes the criminal an honest man, in that he calls out to him, “You still have honor in your body.” Rudolf proves through his punishment to the inhuman being that he yet feels humanly. Rudolf forestalls impoverishment and degradation through excellent institutions, the model husbandry at Bouqueval and the bank for the poor. Rudolf procures subsistence for poverty, right for the rightless. Rudolf unmasks hypocrisy. Rudolf leads the misconduct of over- and mis-education back to true human nature and to genuine love, by pointing it to the communion which beneficence affords. In short, before Rudolf, i.e., the power of the human being who has become conscious of his power of vision, all mysteries vanish. Blinded by prejudices, out of wretched considerations, we have held our eyes shut before them. But when the teacher in his school has to punish two children for one and the same piece of mischief, and he chastises the child from the people, as is fitting, with strokes of the rod, but lets the noble child go out of consideration for the high-placed father—what are such considerations other than the rule of cowardice and wretchedness in him over him? The mysteries are the aristocratic child of history, which, treated finely and courteously, has hitherto never needed to strip itself, whereas with man, the democratic child, one has always proceeded without ceremony.

[Notes for §238 here]

§239 Over against all these untrue usurped mysteries there now stands Fleur-de-Marie as the sole true un-unveilable mystery. Fleur-de-Marie shows the present world the impossibility of becoming what it has capriciously set itself to become, namely the past. The world would have to go under like Fleur-de-Marie. Thereby Fleur-de-Marie paves the way for the thoughts that animate Rudolf, that they may become world-transforming. For to the world that cannot go back there remains only the one possibility, to stride courageously forward and to prove through word and deed that its gaze into the future is no longer an airy vision, but a clear and certain looking-into-itself, before which the mists and clouds must give way that conceal from it what goal it has to reach.

[Notes for §239 here]

§240 Rigolette, however, who in fact already moves within the present world-condition in a free, pure, and untroubled atmosphere, receives her justification only through Fleur-de-Marie. Were the latter not a mirror of the truth that the mystery once was, Rigolette could not look so freely and cheerfully beyond appearance.

[Notes for §240 here]

§241 But precisely because Fleur-de-Marie now bears a truth in her heart at all, she is far more suited than all the world, which lives only in falsehood and halfness, to understand and support Rudolf, who proclaims a new truth. She at once makes Rudolf’s task her own. And that it is also she who, to solve it, succeeds in the most excellent way is proved by the Wolf-girl and indeed by all the captive girls in Saint-Lazare. To this “prison seed” Fleur-de-Marie says: “You torment Mme St. Jean only out of boredom, not out of cruelty. But you forget that she is not alone, that she bears a child beneath her heart. You would otherwise not only refrain from striking her, because you would fear to hurt the poor innocent child, you would even, when it is cold, give the mother everything you can spare to warm it—would you not, Wolf-girl?” They answer as with one mouth: “Surely, who would not have pity on a child? Who would have the heart to do it harm?—We should have to be monsters!”

[Notes for §241 here]

§242 But that, Civilization!—those are your monsters! They are not wilder and more malicious; you make them so!

[Notes for §242 here]

§243 As the captive girls say of Fleur-de-Marie, “She is not like the rest of us,” and are ashamed before her, so must the mysteries of the present confess: the true mystery is different from us. It has been planted by God in the breast of man; but we are entirely common, base, earthly mysteries, which as mysteries are worth nothing, yet, once unveiled, are able and destined to give the world a new shape.

[Notes for §243 here]

§244 The relation between Rudolf and Fleur-de-Marie gives occasion for one last consideration. So long as Rudolf directs the atonement of his personal guilt purely toward the universal essence, it succeeds fully for him in every undertaking; indeed, he receives the proof that he has now expiated his offense: he unexpectedly finds again his daughter and a wife wholly worthy of him. From now on, however, his atonement also acquires a wholly individual interest: in the sly girl whom he encountered in misery and abasement he no longer wishes merely to save humanity, but to elevate the precious Fleur-de-Marie to a princess, i.e., no longer to have the essence acknowledged, but the accident which caused Fleur-de-Marie to be born as his (Rudolf’s) daughter. When he gives Fleur-de-Marie in Bouqueval an unhappy but excellent woman, Madame Georges, for a mother, he stands on the height of his task; when he brings Fleur-de-Marie, his daughter, to Gerolstein, his princely residence, to the court, he falls away from his task. The last attempt too, still in the convent, to preserve the princess, namely to make Fleur-de-Marie abbess, fails.

[Notes for §244 here]

§245 Here Rudolf pays tribute to his time, and that it is so brings him nearer to us. He stands precisely in this world-condition of mysterious halfness and guilt, and that this, for an individual—even if endowed with material and spiritual advantages in the highest degree—at the end proves too mighty, should not astonish us; rather it should be a summons to acknowledge the guilt as a common one and, in the consciousness of this general guilt, to come together into a single whole, which will then be in a position to accomplish what the individual may well make the task of his life, but yet can never quite bring to an end.

[Notes for §245 here]

§246 Let us be neither too fastidious nor too faint-hearted; let each of us step into full life. Let us go there to school where instruction keeps us awake for work, sound for rest, and leaves neither the time to dream nor gives the unquiet sleep. It is time that we no longer merely let ourselves be taught and, in consequence, become learned and docile; no, that we ourselves see, and not this or that, but get to know our conditions, learn to use our powers.

[Notes for §246 here]

§247 If we are not to believe the multitude of readers of The Mysteries of Paris composed of entirely thoughtless stuff, then we may cherish the hope that the extraordinary popularity of our epic will help to put a stop to the general habit according to which some, from within their four stakes, shoot with mere concepts into the blue, while others never lift themselves above the determinate case at hand and their egoistic interest—both thus imagine themselves free from the whole wide, all-encompassing realm of human coexistence and activity, which has neither the concept for its ruler nor the state for its boundary—and will awaken and stir the mass to pure judgment.

[Notes for §247 here]

§248 Whether I have succeeded in proving that The Mysteries of Paris are nothing other than the living critique of the present world-condition — and, indeed, as this critique become flesh and blood, an epic—I must leave to sober judgment. If I have fulfilled my task, then the further conclusions for art—for aesthetics, which cannot prescribe rules, but can only strive to comprehend works of art—are as follows:

[Notes for §248 here]

§249 Art no longer needs to set the category of unity at its summit as its highest dogma and its first and last standard of measure. For romantic art, this was an indispensable necessity, lest it lose and dissolve itself. The object of its representation is, in the highest instance, the eternal and the perfect itself. Yet it knows nothing better than the temporal and the imperfect—the earth, upon which man must earn his bread in the sweat of his brow, and woman must bear her children in pain. And this, which alone it knows, must stand in for and symbolize that which for it is only an intimation, a longing, a wish, a faith, its ideal. Both that which it wishes to represent and that which it can represent it must be ceaselessly laboring to hold together, since they will not of themselves cohere. Hence it is that Romanticism speaks so much of unity, and yet is not unity. Indeed, it is not even so in theory. It proves this, among other things, by the manner in which it derives and develops from the simple Beautiful—the self-contained Beautiful—the Sublime and the Comic, that is, the Beautiful which steps forth from itself and, toward one side or the other, transcends its own bounds.

[Notes for §249 here]

§250 Art which, like The Mysteries of Paris, wishes to rest upon a true Weltanschauung, a real vision of the world, is in itself already unity; it therefore no longer needs the dogma, nor may it any longer acknowledge it.

[Notes for §250 here]

Eugène Sue: die Geheimnisse von Paris. Kritik von Szeliga.

English machine

The Mystery of Brutalisation amid Civilization

The Mystery of Legality within the State

The Mystery of the Educated Society

The Mystery of Piety and Righteousness

The Mystery, a Mockery

Rigolette

The World-Condition of the Mysteries of Paris in General

The Epic Action of the Mysteries of Paris

Murph

Rudolf - the Revealed Mystery of All Mysteries

The Schurimann

The Schoolmaster

Ferrand

Louise Morel

Die Model Farm

The Marquise of Harville

Fleur-de-Marie

Conclusion