Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. I.Jean Paul
General
Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. I.
Jean Paul
Fiction
It is the same fellow who day before yesterday made his entry among us
at Scheerau, with a wax retinue which he had got together, half from
the imperial states and half from among the literati, and with the wax
hands of these twin brothers of man took money from our purse. It is
stupid, that Spitz did not bring me the present dog's-day the day
before yesterday; I could myself have asked the churl, who embossed, in
St. Luna, Victor and the Chaplain in wax, what was the real name of
Victor, and of Eymann, and of St. Luna itself. The result is, that I am
still, with an allowable and biographical curiosity about this
carpenter of men, who surrounds us with awful reflections of our little
being, following on his heels.
Victor must, therefore, again tarry; for he had himself and the
Chaplain baked in wax, in order to give, in the first place, to the
latter, who had a childish fondness for all casts, dolls, and puppets,
and, secondly, to the family, who longed to quarter the waxen
mock-Victor in his vacated chamber, a greater pleasure than to himself.
For he had a horror of these flesh-colored shadows of himself. Even in
childhood, among all ghost-stories, those of people who had seen
themselves crept with the coldest hand over his heart. Often at
evening, before going to bed, he surveyed his trembling body so long,
that at last he detached it from himself, and saw it standing thus
alone beside his self and gesticulating as a strange form; then he
would lay himself down, quaking, with this strange form, in the grave
of sleep, and the darkling soul felt itself like a Hamadryad, grown
over by the pliant fleshy bark. Hence he felt deeply the difference and
the long interval between his self and its bark, when he looked for
some time on another's body, and still more deeply when he contemplated
his own.
He sat opposite the embossing-stool and the embossing-tools, but fixed
his eyes on a book again, so as not to see the corporeal form, in which
he carried himself round, distant and duplicated. The reason why he
nevertheless could endure the reduplication of his face in the glass
can only be, that he regarded the supernumerary in the glass either
merely as a superficial portrait without cubic contents, or as the only
archetype with which we compare other duplicates of our person.... Upon
these points I can never speak, myself, without a certain tremor....
The wax-copy of Victor, to express his majority, was arrayed in a _toga
virilis_, an overcoat which the original had cast off; likewise the
chamber which the living one vacated was cleared out. The Chaplain
proposed to himself to place this cheap edition of Horion in the window
when the better one was gone, in such a manner that all the school
youth, who learned from the chorister manners and _mores_, should doff
their hats to it when they came tearing out of the school-house.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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