Courts and courtiers -- Fiction; German fiction -- Translations into English; Germany -- Fiction
During the first few days after the seminary assembled, he kept silence
and confined himself to observation, but then he approached the Prince
with a jovial and cheery frankness, a fresh fatherly camaraderie such as
Klaus Heinrich had never before experienced. It disturbed him at first,
he looked in terror at the doctor's green face; but his confusion found
no echo in the doctor, and in no way discouraged him, it confirmed him
in his hearty bumptious ingenuousness, and it was not long before Klaus
Heinrich was warmed and won, for there was nothing vulgar, nothing
degrading, not even anything designed and school-masterish in Doctor
Ueberbein's methods--all they showed was the superiority of a man who
had knocked about the world, and, at the same time, his tender and open
respect for Klaus Heinrich's different birth and position; they showed
affection and recognition, at the same time as the cheerful offer of a
league between their two different kinds of existence. He called him
"Highness" once or twice, then simply "Prince," then quite simply "Klaus
Heinrich." And he stuck to the last.
When the "Pheasants" went out for a ride, these two rode at the head,
the doctor on his stout piebald to the left of Klaus Heinrich on his
docile chestnut--trotted when snow or leaves were falling, through
springtime thaws or summer heat, along the edge of the woodlands across
country, or through the villages, while Doctor Ueberbein related
anecdotes of his life. Raoul Ueberbein sounds funny, doesn't it? The
very reverse of _chic_. Yes, Ueberbein had been the name of his adoptive
parents, a poor, oldish couple of the inferior bank-clerk class, and he
had a quite legal right to it. But that he should be called Raoul had
been the decision and mandate of his mother, when she handed over the
sum agreed on, together with his fateful little person, to the others--a
sentimental decision obviously, a decision prompted by piety. At least
it was quite possible that his legal and real father had been called
Raoul, and it was to be hoped that his surname had been something which
harmonized with it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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