Authors: Penelope Fitzgerald
T
HE
Freiherr von Hardenberg wrote to Kreisamtmann Just.
Who was this von Kuhn, the actual father of this Sophie? They tell me that he is the son of Wilhelm Kuhn, who acquired in 1743, let us say fifty years ago, the proprietorship of Gruningen and Nieder-Topfstedt, and, after that, somehow managed to get a patent of nobility. In good time his son, this Sophie’s father, installs himself at Gruningen. His first wife is called Schmidt; she dies. His second wife is called Schaller, then
he
dies. The widow takes up with a certain Captain Rockenthien, I think from the Prince of Schwarzburg’s Regiment, thus he in turn becomes the master of Gruningen and Nieder-Topsftedt. I do not think that as yet Rockenthien himself has had the assurance to apply for a patent of nobility.
Kreisamtmann Just replied to Freiherr von Hardenberg.
I can only repeat what I have said before, that I have taught your son all the routine that he needs to know for an official career, and in talking to him I, too, have glimpsed new horizons.
The Freiherr von Hardenberg to Kreisamtmann Just.
Glimpse what horizons you like, but why, in God’s name, did you take him to the Rockenthiens?
He took Fritz’s letter to Leipzig, where he sat with old friends in the club reserved for nobility, stifling in summer, since the members forbade the waiters to open the steam-clouded windows facing the street. There he consulted old friends, as to how he should answer his eldest son. He button-holed the old Count Julius von Schweinitz and the only slightly younger Graf von Loeben, and asked them what they themselves should do if either of their eldest sons should insist on marrying a grocer’s daughter. His mind was, perhaps, beginning to give way a little.
Fritz had asked his mother to meet him in the garden simply so that they would not be overseen by his father, without reflecting what an extraordinary thing it would be for her to do. Auguste nowadays scarcely ever went out at all, never alone, never at night, and certainly never without the Freiherr’s considered permission. When she
told her maid to get out her black shawl, because she was going out by herself into the garden, the old woman began to say her prayers. Still, by the time the Freifrau had made her way down the unfamiliar back stairs, the alert had been given to everyone in the kitchens and the yard. At the bottom of the steps which led into the upper part of the garden the head gardener was waiting in the dusk with a light to open the gate. That was as well, because she had no key and had given no thought to how she should get in.
In the ordinary way she would have excused or explained herself, but not to-night. She was absorbed not so much in anxiety for Fritz as in gratification at being wanted and needed and told to meet him in the garden.
She stood just inside the gate, listening to the shifting and creaking and strange repeated ticking which birds, in their restless half-sleep, make all night. They lodged in the great cherry tree, which produced two hundred pounds of fruit in a good summer, so that at first light they could start gorging themselves before the gardener’s boy arrived. The cherries were almost black, but could still be distinguished from the mass of leaves, gently stirring although there seemed to be no wind.
Fritz was there already, coming towards her up the path from the lower garden. ‘Mother, you know I would not keep you waiting.’
The numberless times he had done so no longer
existed. ‘Dear Fritz, have you been to see your father?’
‘Not yet.’
They sat on two of the old wooden chairs left out all summer under the cherry tree. When Fritz had been born, sickly and stupid, she had been given the blame, and had accepted it. When after months of low fever he had become tall and thin and, as they all said, a genius, she had not been given any credit, and had not expected any. He asked her why she was wearing her winter shawl.
‘It’s June, mother. Otherwise I should never have asked you to meet me outside.’
Auguste saw now that the shawl was ridiculous. ‘But Fritz, I feel safe in it.’ He smiled, and did not need to say, ‘You are safe with me.’
An extraordinary notion came to the Freifrau Auguste, that she might take advantage of this moment, which in its half-darkness and fragrance seemed to her almost sacred, to talk to her eldest son about herself. All that she had to say could be put quite shortly: she was forty-five, and she did not see how she was going to get through the rest of her life. Abruptly Fritz leaned towards her and said, ‘You know that I have only one thing to ask. Has he read my letter?’
Immediately she came to herself. ‘Fritz, he surely must have done, but I can’t tell. He has never shown me his letters, but then, God forgive me, I did not show him yours. However, the whole household are to join in a
prayer meeting tomorrow evening to consider an important family question.’
‘But, mother, you are on my side, tell me that is so. You approve of what I have done, and what I am going to do. I am following my heart and my soul, you cannot be against me.’
She cried, ‘No! No!’ but when he went on, ‘In that case, why don’t you tell my father what you feel?’ she answered, ‘But I have to obey him, that is natural.’
‘Nonsense, in the world of Nature the female is often stronger than the male, and dominates him.’
‘You mean among the birds and insects,’ said the Freifrau timidly. ‘But, Fritz, they know no better.’
Paying attention only to her mindless tenderness for him, he said, ‘You must tell my father that it is not enough for him only to agree to my engagement. We must have somewhere to live, for Sophie and myself to live, the two of us, alone and together. You understand me, you are not too old to have forgotten.’
Auguste allowed herself to remember what she had felt when she and the Freiherr were left, for the first time, alone and together. But what mattered now was her son, almost, for the moment, in the overwhelming summer night, a stranger. ‘Indeed, yes, Fritz, of course.’
She could be seen to be struggling with a small package, which she had hidden in the pocket of her top under-petticoat.
‘Fritz, my dearest, this is my gold bracelet. Well! I have others, but this is truly mine, it was not given to me by your father, I received it from my godmother when I was twelve, on the occasion of my confirmation. It has been enlarged since then, but only a little, I wish you to have it altered, and made into your engagement rings.’
‘The rings have already been made, mother. Look!’
Sophie sey mein schuz geist
.
‘Indeed, mother, I must not take your bracelet, I do not need it, put it away, consider yourself, or keep it, if anything, for Sidonie.’
Thoughtfulness can be much more painful than neglect. The Freifrau, however, had had very few opportunities to learn this.
Back in her room, which was still at the top of the house, she let herself reflect that if only Fritz could always be at home, even with a new wife, she would want no further earthly happiness. Then she prayed for forgiveness, because she must have forgotten, if only for a moment, the welfare of the Bernhard.
The Bernhard himself, however, thought of it unremittingly. ‘What will become of us, Sidonie?’ he asked plaintively. ‘To whom will you yourself be married? You’re difficult, you felt nothing at all for that medical fellow who came on the washday, although he couldn’t stop looking at you. You may well be left a spinster.
Karl and Anton, I know, are provided for, and Asmus is supposed to have passed his first exams as a forester …’
‘I
have
passed them,’ said Erasmus. ‘The principal congratulated me, so did my father, so did Fritz. He sent me a copy of
Robinson Crusoe
.’
‘So, please lend it to me.’
‘It’s in English,’ said Erasmus. ‘You can’t read English.’
‘That is true,’ said Bernhard with a deep sigh. ‘In those wild forests of words I am lost.’
‘In any case,’ said Anton, ‘you should never lend a book or a woman. There’s no obligation to return either.’
‘Anton, you are trying to talk like Karl,’ said Sidonie. ‘But you have not got it quite right.’
‘It’s simply that I feel the time approaching when a decision will be made about me,’ said the Bernhard, standing up among them with the air of the boy Jesus among the Elders in the print on his bedroom wall.
‘You know you’re to be a page,’ said Anton. ‘The Electoral Courts of Thuringia and Saxony little know what’s coming to them.’
‘I appeal to all of you,’ the Bernhard cried. ‘Who in their senses would think of me as a page? Whatever it is that a page is obliged to do, I know that I could not do it.’
Tears ran down his face, and yet the Hardenbergs were at a kind of ease. Fritz, after he had spoken to his mother, had not stayed even for a night. The Freiherr had
departed for a few days, taking with him as a confidential servant the pious Gottfried. Throughout the house there could be sensed, as when music changes not its theme but its key, a little less concentration on the soul, a little more on the body. Today, at half past eight in the morning, they were all still at breakfast. The Freifrau had not come down. Erasmus and Anton sprawled on their chairs. The windows were open down to the ground, the air brought in the scent of the cherry-trees - even of the amarelles, grown for making kirsch, which would not fruit till the autumn - and, from beyond Weissenfels, of the first hay-cutting. All four of them, even the Bernhard, knew that they were not unhappy that morning, but had too much good sense to say anything, even to themselves, about it.
The Freiherr had gone to the Brethren at Neudietendorf to consult the Prediger. At the risk of wordiness, he had spoken of his family properties - bankrupt Oberwiederstadt, the four lost estates, sold to strangers, and Schloben, the beloved Schloben-bei-Jena with its poplars and mill-stream, where he hoped to live in his retirement, making it a centre for some of the older Brethren.
‘Meanwhile, my eldest son ignores my wishes. If Oberwiederstadt and Schloben were to be settled upon him, I cannot tell what he would do. It would be only decent for him to marry into the nobility and to find a woman
with adequate wealth. Don’t tell me I am always thinking about money, it is precisely that I don’t want to have to think about it at all. But since the recent events in France the world is turned upside down, and a father’s necessities no longer weigh with his sons.’
The Prediger nodded, and said that he would give his advice if Hardenberg would undertake to follow it. The Freiherr gave his word. The next day he rode back to Weissenfels with Gottfried. They stopped at no inns, and exchanged very few words. Silence between them said more.
Leipziger Zeitung
, 13 July 1796
Christiane Wilhelmine Sophie v. Kuhn
Georg Philipp Friedrich v. Hardenberg
betrothed
Gruningen Weissenfels
S
ERVANTS
appeared out of the yard gate of the house in the Kloster Gasse. The carrier had brought a pianoforte, ordered by the Freiherr, from Leipzig.
Everyone knows how best to move a piano, or rather, how it should be moved. Not up the front steps, you triple fool! - A little to the right. - It would be easier if we could take off the legs.
When the piano had reached its resting place in the salon and stood unwrapped from its straw and sackcloth, it could be seen to be a thing of beauty, rare in that austere household. Already, however, it had caused trouble enough, since the Father, although he had made up his mind some time ago to replace the harpsichord, had not been able to decide whether to order from Gottlieb Silbermann or Andreas Stein. ‘Silbermann’s pianos are more sonorous,’ wrote the Uncle Wilhelm, ‘but the touch is heavier than Stein’s. For Stein’s, on the other hand, one must send to Vienna.’
‘This from Wilhelm,’ shouted the Freiherr, ‘who
scarcely knows one note from another. The horses in his stable recognise more tunes than Wilhelm.’ He continued to take, and discard, advice. ‘The French manufacturers are the best,’ old Heun assured him. ‘They escaped the unpleasant situation in Paris, they have all taken refuge in London, where they live in the British Museum. You may enquire of them there.’
If the Freifrau had been consulted she would have said that she did not care for the pianoforte, as an instrument, at all, and thought it dull in comparison with the sparkling chatter of the harpsichord, which reminded her of her girlhood. The harpsichord, which had now been moved out of the house, was in fact the one she had brought with her to Oberwiederstadt on the occasion of her marriage. It was French, and had a picture of a ruined temple by moonlight on the inside of the lid. But the relentless damp of Weissenfels, where the Saale secretively chose its own time, at any season of the year, to flood its banks, had mouldered it gradually away. The painting had become almost invisible, the jacks were like a row of ageing teeth, some missing. It had come to need re-tuning every evening, and by the morning the pitch was gone. Bits of it, too, appeared to have come unscrewed. ‘I dare say I shall be blamed,’ said the Bernhard. And in fact Karl complained that they had allowed the Angel to make a
Pfuscherei
of the harpsichord while he was with his regiment. ‘But in any case you cannot play it as well
as Anton,’ said the Bernhard, ‘and it is being sold for firewood.’
The Freiherr bought a piano by Johannes Zumpe, one of Silbermann’s apprentices, which had been advertised in the
Zeitung
. In this way he succeeded in not following his brother Wilhelm’s advice.
Anton was called upon. Anton, who had been thought to have not much interest in life beyond following Karl’s example, was now the necessary person. All the family could play - Erasmus could play anything by ear, Sidonie was truly musical, but they could not play like Anton.
The Zumpe piano had a third pedal, which allowed the three lowest octaves to be sustained, while the treble was damped in the ordinary way. Anton sat alone, refusing any help, in the salon. Although it hadn’t been one of the Freiherr’s requirements when he bought the house, the Hardenbergs’ salon had been built originally as a music room and for nothing else, and the airy space faithfully carried every note, balanced it, and let it fall reluctantly.
The Freiherr now told his wife to invite suitable guests from Weissenfels and the surrounding neighbourhood to a
soiree
. ‘He is so good-hearted, Sidonie. He cannot rest until he has shared the beauty of the new music.’ Hardenberg went out so little, except to meetings of the Brethren and on tours of inspection, that he did not
realise that a piano was anything but a novelty at Weissenfels. Chief Magistrate von Lindenau even had a Broadwood, ordered from England to his own specifications.
‘Surely what we are sharing is my father’s heartfelt pleasure in Fritz’s engagement,’ said Sidonie.
‘Of course, my dear.’
‘The party from Gruningen - we can’t tell how many will come - cannot, of course, return home the same night. They must all stay here, and you will have to consider about the rooms.’
‘How fortunate that we bought the slop-pails!’
No-one in Weissenfels looked forward very much to the Hardenbergs’ invitations, but they were so rare - this was not thought of as meanness, everyone knew of their piety and charity - and so formally expressed, that they seemed less of a celebration than a register of slowly passing time, like mortality itself. Most of the guests would be town officials, all would know each other. But none of them would have met the Rockenthiens, except of course the Justs. The Justs had the farthest to come, but would spend the night at the house of old Heun, who was Rahel’s uncle.
Lukas was at the door, Gottfried in charge of the
Vorzimmer
, which led into the great downstairs reception room. His last trip with the Freiherr to Neudietendorf seemed to have left him in a position of mild, almost benign authority, which had not been so noticeable
before. Erasmus thought it possible that he had been drinking.
‘Inconceivable,’ said Sidonie. ‘You have been too long away from home.’
Small groups of people, in threes and fours, lingered in the Kloster Gasse to watch the Hardenbergs’ guests arrive, particularly the rarely-seen country nobility. Old Count Julius von Schweinitz und Krain was driven up in a great barouche like a coffin. ‘Take me to some quiet place.’ Gottfried gave him an arm to the study.
In the reception room the servants slowly circulated, offering small glasses of arrack. Fritz kept a watch for those whom he thought of as his own friends, and for those who understood poetry - for example, Friedrich Brachmann, the advocate, who had studied with him in Leipzig. Brachmann was crippled from birth, but he walked so carefully, you wouldn’t know it (everyone in Weissenfels knew it). Brachmann was hoping to enter the tax department. His limp would not matter there, his ideas about aesthetics would not matter much either. Fritz put an arm through his, and the other one round Frederick Severin.
‘Ah, best of friends, I congratulate you,’ said Severin. ‘And how is the little brother who likes the water?’
‘I think he is not supposed to be downstairs,’ replied Fritz, ‘but I daresay he is.’
Louise, Brachmann’s sister, was the dear friend of
Sidonie, who moved towards her as her name was announced by Gottfried. Louise was twenty-nine, and a poet.
Both girls were in white, run up by the same dressmaker, but Sidonie seemed to be moving in flight or in a drift of whiteness, delicate, weightless, strange to the onlookers of Weissenfels, while Louise could only hope not to hear, at least for this summer, the suggestion that it was perhaps time Fraulein Brachmann should give up wearing white altogether.
‘Oh Louise, Louise, I have spoken to Fritz: he is going to send your poems to Friedrich Schiller, only you must keep copies, my dear, because these great men frequently lose what is sent to them.’
Sidonie’s eyes shone with the pleasure of pleasing. Louise did not reply.
‘But that was what you wanted, Lu?’
‘Is your brother not going to read them himself?’
Sidonie faltered.
‘I am sure he must have done.’
‘What did he say to you about them?’ Then, after a moment. ‘It does not signify, they are only words, the broken words of a woman.’
Sidonie wished that the party from Gruningen would arrive, and fix the attention of the lot of them: then the piano would surely draw them all together. That the Rockenthiens had set out she knew, since the Mandelsloh
had had the good sense to send off the stable-boy (the new stable-boy) as messenger the moment they started. The boy, covered with a thick coating of dust, had now arrived, and was being petted in the kitchen. Meantime here were the Justs, Coelestin magnificent in the dark green ceremonial uniform of his rank. Heun, who came with them, was also entitled to a uniform, though not, apparently, one that fitted him. Karoline, who rarely took anything, swallowed half a glass of arrack, and went to stand with Fritz, Erasmus, Severin and Brachmann.
‘Where is Sidonie?’ she asked.
‘With Louise, with poor Louise,’ said Erasmus. ‘But all that matters is that you have arrived. You are the best friend any of us have, the very best. You are the conciliator. Not even Sidonie can do it so well.’
‘That is so,’ said Fritz. ‘Where Justen is, one can be at peace.’
‘Then I hope,
mademoiselle
, you will visit my bookshop,’ said Severin.
‘Of course she will,’ Fritz cried. ‘She knows as much about books as I do, and far more about music.’
‘There is nothing to know about music,’ said Karoline, smiling.
‘You must play for us later on.’
‘I would not dream of it.’
‘Fritz bowed and excused himself, having duties everywhere. Karoline looked slowly round her, not allowing
herself to watch where he went. She saw the guests as drifts of grey, black, and brown, with the uniforms (since most of those who wore them preferred to talk to each other) as knots of glittering colour, becoming less harsh as the evening light began to fade. The twilight, God be thanked, merciful to us all. The white dresses, now the most conspicuous of all, still lingered on the outer edge of the groups, except for Sidonie’s. She had hurried to the side of Senf, who was standing entirely by himself, wearing, to mark his consciousness of his former disgrace (although he had plenty of good clothes), a patched swallow-tail coat. Sidonie was shaking her head at him, and laughing. This seemed extraordinary, for Senf had never been known to say anything amusing. He looked surprised, almost bewitched.
Fritz himself was for the moment with Louise, bending over her awkwardly, but with an instinct of true kindness. The poetess gaped up at him like a fish.
Brachmann drew Erasmus aside a little, towards the windows, and said, ‘You know, I have never met Fraulein Just before. She is no longer quite young, but she has worth and serenity.’ He paused. ‘Do you think she would consider a lame man for a husband?
Erasmus, staggered, was able to answer, ‘Oh, but her affections are engaged - I don’t know where and I don’t know who to, but I do know that much.’
What an embarrassing pair they are, he thought, this
brother and sister. It would be much easier if they could marry each other.
‘You were asking about the Bernhard,’ said Karoline, left alone with Severin. ‘I believe Hardenberg is truly interested in his younger brother. Indeed, he is altogether very fond of children.’
‘Quite possibly he is,’ said Severin. ‘As to Bernhard, you must remember that not all children are child-like.’