The Adventurous Simplicissimus: being the description of the Life of a Strange vagabond named Melchior Sternfels von FuchshaimGrimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoph von
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The Adventurous Simplicissimus: being the description of the Life of a Strange vagabond named Melchior Sternfels von Fuchshaim
Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoph von
German fiction -- Translations into English; Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648 -- Fiction
But to return to "Courage." Her Danish lover is about to marry her when
he too dies, and after this disappointment she sinks lower and lower in
the social scale, forming temporary connections successively with a
captain, a lieutenant, a corporal and finally with a musqueteer, who is
no other than our old friend "Jump i' th' Field," for whose name she
gives us a very complete and quite untranslatable reason. With him she
journeys, as a Marketenderin or female sutler, to Italy, following the
army of Colalto and Gallas, and there, with his assistance, she plays a
variety of tricks, always knavish and often highly diverting. Grown
rich, the vivandière dismisses poor "Jump i' th' Field" with a handsome
present, and again resumes her trade of a superior courtesan in the
town from which she journeys to the Spa, where she found and beguiled
Simplicissimus. Her luck now turns; owing to a scandalous adventure
under a pear-tree--the story is a mere copy of a well-known one in the
"Hundred New Novels"--she is expelled from the town with the loss of
all her money and almost of her life--so severe in the matter of public
morals were the laws, in the midst of the general welter of wickedness
then prevailing. Her beauty lost, she becomes a petty trader in wine
and tobacco, and finally marries a gipsy chief; in which position we
find her and leave her.
This story ended, the secretary and his friends in the inn are joined
by Simplicissimus's old foster-father and mother--the "Dad" and "Mammy"
of our romance--and also by young Simplicissimus, Courage's alleged
son. She has avenged herself on her faithless lover, as she tells us in
her own history, by laying at his door the child of her maid. It is for
this reason that she entitles her narrative "Trutzsimplex," or "Spite
Simplex." Her revenge, however, for reasons plainly hinted at,
miscarries; the child is her lover's after all. The merry company of
six then divert themselves during the short winter afternoon with a
profitable exhibition of Simplicissimus's tricks in the market-place,
and the night is pleasantly spent in listening to Springinsfeld's
account of his own life and adventures.
The son of a Greek woman and an Albanian juggler, he follows in early
boyhood his father's trade. Carried away from the port of Ragusa by an
accident, he is landed in the Spanish Netherlands, and there serves
under Spinola, then with that general's army in the Rhine Palatinate,
and then in Pappenheim's cavalry. He is present at Breitenfeld and
Lützen, and while temporarily out of the service falls in with
"Courage" as above narrated. On leaving her, he sets up as an
innkeeper, and prospers, but is ruined through his own incorrigible
knavery. Serving against the Turks, he is wounded, and takes to
fiddling to support himself, marrying also a hurdy-gurdy girl of loose
character. In the course of their vagabond life there occurs the
incident which leads to the most ingenious and attractive of all the
romances of the cycle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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