The Invisible Lodge. Jean Paul

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FIRST SECTION.

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Courting by Chess.--Graduated Recruit.--Copulative Cat

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      In my opinion, what made the Head-forester Von Knör so incredibly sharp-set upon chess was, that from one year's end to the other, he had nothing to do but to be, once during that time, the guest, the Santa Hermandad or Holy Brotherhood and the Dispenser of Bulls to the rangers.

      The reader can surely never have heard of an amateur with so extravagant a passion as his. The least he could do was to send for all his servants to the village of Strehpcnik, (where one gains as much immunity from taxation by chess as a nobleman does by a Saxon Diet,) in order that he might (though in a different sense from that of Cato) have as many opponents as servants. For another instance, he and a nobleman of Upper Yssel in Zwoll spent more postal money in writing than in riding, inasmuch as they played chess at a distance of 250 miles, not with fingers, but with pens. Still another fact may satisfy the reader, viz., that he and Kempele's Automaton Chess-player corresponded with each other, and that the fellow-lodger and adjutant of the wooden Moslem, Herr von Kempele, once in my presence wrote back to him from Hay street in Leipsic, in the name of the Mussulman, that the latter castled. The reader will have his own reflections on the subject, when told that the man, within two years, traveled away to Paris, to go to the Palais Royal and to the Société du Salon des Echecs, and to sit down there as chess-combatant, and jump up again as chess-conqueror, although he was afterward cudgeled much too severely in a democratic street, for having cried out in sleep: Gardez la Reine! It may simply seem striking to one and another that his daughter never could win a new hat from him or a new dressing-maid (soubrette) to put it on for her, except by winning at the same time a game of chess. But one thing will astonish and vex all who read me, of either sex and of every age, namely, that the Head-forester had sworn he would give his daughter to no other beast in the whole knightly circle but the one who should win not only her heart but at the same time the victory over her in a game of chess--and that in seven weeks.

      The ground he took, and his chain of reasoning, was this: "A good mathematician is a good chess-player; therefore, vice-versâ--a good mathematician knows the Differential Calculus ten times better than a poor one,--and a good master of Differentiation understands himself as well as any one in the matter of wheeling and deploying,^[2] and consequently can command his company (and his wife, in fact,) at any hour--and why then should not one give so accomplished, so experienced an officer, his only daughter?" My reader would certainly have seated himself forthwith at the chess-board and thought to himself: the drawing of such a quaternion^[3] from the board as the daughter of a Head-forester, is an extraordinarily easy matter; but it is confoundedly hard when the father himself watches behind her chair, and prompts the daughter in every move whereby she is to guard her king and the maiden-queen (herself) from my reader.

      No one who had heard of it could comprehend why the Forester's Lady, who had long been the Maid of Honor to a Countess von Ebersdorf, with her fine feelings and her piety, could tolerate such a hunter's-whim; but the truth is, she had a Moravian fancy of her own to carry out, namely, that the first child of her daughter Ernestina should be trained for Heaven; that is to say eight years under the earth--"eighty years for all me!" said the old man.

      Now, although in any case one has a plaguey hard time with a daughter, whether one would draw subscribers (i. e. suitors) to her or drive them away, nevertheless Knör found in this case his true heaven upon earth--among so many Knights of Chess, all fighting for his Ernestina and losing her and the game. For she, with a head into which her father had poured light, and a heart into which her mother had infused virtue, could conquer more easily than be conquered; hence a whole brigade of youthful suitors vexed and played themselves almost to death. And yet there were some among them who in all castles round about claimed the name of sweet gentlemen because they had not sailors' manners, as, in comparison with briny and bitter sea-water, we call our flat, fresh water sweet.

      But the reader and I will jump over the whole company of players, and place ourselves beside the Cavalry Captain, von Falkenberg, who is standing by the father and who is also bent upon marriage. This officer--a man of courage and good nature, without any principles, except that of honor; who, in order not to "write any thing behind his ears" as the phrase is, i. e., not to lay up any grudge against another (the ears, especially when of some length, being generally the black-board and tally-stick of received offences), would rather box those of other Christians; who acted more finely than he spoke, and whose full-length portrait^[4] I have not room enough to spread out between these two dashes--had continued enlisting recruits in this part of the country so long that at last his affections were enlisted by Ernestina. There was nothing he hated so much as chess and Moravianism; meanwhile Knör said to him: At twelve o'clock tonight the seven tournament-weeks of the game were to begin, and if at twelve o'clock, seven weeks hence, he had not sent his antagonist from the battle-field to the bridal chamber he should be heartily sorry, and all the eight years' education would then go for nothing.

      For the first fourteen days the playing and--loving went on in fact too negligently. But at that time neither I nor other clever people had written those ardent romances, wherewith--a serious thing for us to answer for--we transform young people into crackling, roaring, rotatory stoves of love, which burst with the heat and become calcined, and after marriage СКАЧАТЬ