Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces;: or, the Wedded Life, Death, and Marriage of Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkaes, Parish Advocate in the Burgh of Kuhschnappel.Jean Paul
General
Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces;: or, the Wedded Life, Death, and Marriage of Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkaes, Parish Advocate in the Burgh of Kuhschnappel.
Jean Paul
German fiction -- Translations into English
She was an Augspurger by birth--only daughter of the deceased
Engelkraut, clerk of the Lutheran Council--and she lived in the
Fuggery, in a roomy mansion which was probably bigger than many
drawing-rooms are. She was by no means portionless, for she lived by
her own work, not on other people's, as penisoned court-ladies'-maids
do. She had all the newest fashions in bonnets and other headgear in
her hands earlier than the richest ladies of the neighbourhood, albeit
in such miniature editions that not even a duck could have got them on;
and she erected edifices for the female head at a few days' notice, on
a large scale, after these miniature sketches and small-scale plans of
them.
All that Siebenkæs did during his long wait was to depose on oath (more
than once) that it was the devil who invented _seeking_, and his
grandmother who devised _waiting_. At length, while it was still pretty
early, came, not the bride, but a night post from Augspurg, with an
epistle from the Schulrath to say that he and the lady "could
not possibly arrive before Tuesday. She was still busy at her
wedding-clothes, and he in the libraries of the ex-Jesuits, and of
Privy Councillor Zopf, and (among the antiquities) at the city gates."
Siebenkæs's butterfly-proboscis, however, found plenty of open honey
cells in every blue thistle blossom of his fate; he could now, on this
idle Monday, make a final application of the arm file and agate
burnisher to his room, brush out the dust and the writing-sand with the
feather of a quill from his table, rout out the accumulations of bits
of paper and other rubbish from behind the mirror, wash, with
unspeakable labour, the white porcelain inkstand into a more dazzling
whiteness, and bring the butter-boat and the coffee-pot into a more
advanced and prominent position (drawing them up in rank and file on
the cupboard), and polish the brass nails on the grandfather's leather
arm-chair till they shone again. This new temple-purification of his
chamber he undertook merely by way of something to do; for a scholar
considers the mere _arranging_ of his books and papers to _be_ a
purification as of the temple, at least so maintained the parish
advocate, saying further, "orderliness is, properly defined, nothing
but a happy knack which people acquire of putting a thing for twenty
years in the _old_ place, let that place be where it will."
Not only was he tenant of a pleasant room, but also of a long red
dining-table, which he had hired and placed beside a commoner one; also
of some high-backed arm-chairs: moreover the landlords or proprietors
of the furniture and of the lodgings (who all lived in the house) had
all been invited by him to dinner on this his play Monday, which was an
excellent arrangement, inasmuch as--most of the people of the house
being working-men--their play Monday and his fell together; for it was
only the landlord who was anything superior, and he was a wig-maker.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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