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
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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
It was so ordained, however, that matters should not even rest _here_
(as regarded our couple's promenade), but one of the above-mentioned
ingenious evil spirits changed the scene of the drama with such
nimbleness, that we have a fresh combination before our eyes before we
know where we are. Just in front of our wedded pair, a master tailor of
the Catholic confession was taking his walk, most sprucely attired in
honour of the Feast of the Annunciation, like all the rest of his
_pro_- and CON-fession. As ill luck would have it, this tailor, being
in a narrow walk, had (whether for fear of mud, or in the delight of
his soul over his holiday) so elevated his coat-tails that the
vertebral extremity, the _os coccygis_, or (shall we call it) insertion
of the spinal cord, of his waistcoat, was clearly exhibited; in other
words, the _background_ of his waistcoat, which, as we know, is
generally executed in colours more subdued than those used for the
brighter and more prominent foreground on the chest of the wearer. "Hy!
Mr.!" cried Lenette; "what are you doing with a lot of my chintz on the
back of you?"
The truth was that this tailor had put aside and taken possession of so
much of a nice green Augspurg chintz (sent to him by Lenette, on her
becoming a queen, to make her a new body) as he considered proper and
Christianly honest, calculating on the principle of "no charge for wine
samples," and this trifle of a sample had just barely sufficed to form
a sober background to his pea-green waistcoat; and he had contented
himself with so dim a reverse side for this waistcoat in the confident
expectation that it would never be seen. However, as the tailor went on
with his walk (after Lenette had shouted her query at him), as utterly
unmoved as if it had nothing on earth to do with _him_, the little
spark of her anger became a blazing flame, and, regardless of all her
husband's winks and whispers, she cried aloud, "Why, it's my very own
chintz, that I got all the way from Augspurg; do you hear, Mr. Mowser,
you've stolen my chintz, you blackguard, you!" Then, and not till then,
the guilty chintz-robber turned round with much _sangfroid_, and said,
"_Prove_ that, if you please! But, mind, _I'll_ CHINTZ YOU, if there be
such a thing as law in all Kuhschnappel."
At this she burst into a conflagration. Her husband's prayers and
entreaties were but as wind to her. "Ey! you riff-raff," she snapped
out. "But I'll have what's my own--you villain!" she cried. The only
reply the tailor vouchsafed to this attack was this--he simply lifted
his coat-tails with both hands high above the endorsed waistcoat, and,
bending a little forward, said, "There!" after which he strode slowly
on, keeping at the same focal distance from her, so as to bask in her
warmth as long as possible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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