Courts and courtiers -- Fiction; German fiction -- Translations into English; Germany -- Fiction
He had known nothing, understood nothing, suspected nothing of the
difficulty and sternness of the life prescribed for him; he had been
merry and careless, and had given his guardians many a scare. But there
was no resisting the impressions which soon came thronging upon him and
forcing him to open his eyes to the real state of things. In the
northern suburbs, not far from the spa-gardens, a new road had been
opened: people told him that the City Council had decided to call it
"Klaus Heinrich Strasse." Once when driving out with his mother and he
called at a picture-dealer's, they wanted to buy something. The footman
waited at the carriage door, the public gathered round, the
picture-dealer bustled about--there was nothing new in all that. But
Klaus Heinrich for the first time noticed his photograph in the shop
window. It was hanging next those of artists and great men, men with
lofty brows, with a look of the loneliness of fame in their eyes.
People were satisfied with him on the whole. He gained dignity with
years, and self-possession under the pressure of his exalted calling.
But the strange thing was that his longing increased at the same time:
that roving inquisitiveness which Schulrat Dröge was not the man to
satisfy, and which had impelled him to chat with the lackeys. He had
given up doing that; it did not lead to anything. They smiled at him,
confirming him by that very laugh in the suspicion that his world of the
symmetrically marshalled candles presented an unconscious antithesis to
the world outside, but they were no manner of help to him. He looked
round about him on the expeditions, in the walks he took through the
town gardens with Ditlinde and the Swiss governess, followed by a
lackey. He felt that if they were all of one mind to stare at him, while
he was all alone and made conspicuous just to be stared at, he also had
no share in their being and doing. He realized that they presumably were
not always as he saw them, when they stood and greeted him with
deferential looks; that it must be his birth and upbringing which made
their looks deferential, and that it was with them as with the children
when they heard about fairy princes, and were thereby refined and
elevated above their work-a-day selves. But he did not know what they
looked like and were when they were not refined and elevated above their
work-a-day selves--his "exalted calling" concealed this from him, and it
was a dangerous and improper wish to allow his heart to be moved by
things which his exaltedness concealed from him. And yet he wished it,
he wished it from a jealousy and that roving inquisitiveness which
sometimes drove him to undertake voyages of exploration into unknown
regions of the old Schloss, with Ditlinde his sister, when the
opportunity offered.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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