41
Sophie at Fourteen
TWO days before Sophie’s fourteenth birthday, on the 15th of March 1796, the anniversary of his engagement - still not authorised, and indeed not discussed so far, with his father - Fritz went to the jewellers in Tennstedt to have yet another alteration to his ring. It was to contain a tiny likeness of Sophie, he explained, taken from the miniature which had disappointed everybody - that couldn’t be helped. Her startled, eager expression was there at least, and her mixture of darkness and brightness. On the reverse, he told them to engrave the words - Sophie sey mein schuz geist - Sophie be my guardian spirit. In her birthday poem he wrote: What I looked for, I have found:
What I found, has looked for me.
In the June of 1796 Fritz wrote to both his father and his mother.
Dear Father,
Not without great unease do I send this letter which I have dreaded for so long. Long ago I would have sent it, if unfavourable circumstances had not arisen. All my hopes depend on your friendliness and sympathy. There is nothing wrong with what lies in my heart, but it is a subject on which parents and children often do not understand each other. I know that you always want to be a patron and friend to your children, but you are a Father, and often fatherly love contradicts the son’s inclination.
I have chosen a maiden. She has little wealth, and although she is equal to the nobility, she is not of ancient lineage. She is Fraulein von Kuhn. Her parents, of whom the mother is the property owner, lie in Gruningen. I got to know her on an official visit to her stepfather’s house. I enjoy the friendship and confidence of the whole family. But Sophie’s answering choice long remained doubtful.
Long since would I have sought your confidence and consent, but at the beginning of November Sophie became grievously ill, and even now she is only recovering slowly. You can give back my peace. I beg from you consent and authorisation of my choice.
More by word of mouth. It all depends on you, to make this the happiest period of my life. True, my sphere of activity would be reduced by this match, but I rely for my future on industry, faith and economy, and on Sophie’s intelligence and good management. She has not been grandly brought up - she is content with little - I need only what she needs. God bless this important, so anxious, so difficult-to-pass-through hour. It is good to speak out and say what you mean, but you can make me happy only through your consenting Father’s voice.
Fritz
Dear little Mother,
I will wait for you at nine in the evening on Wednesday two weeks from now, alone in our garden at Weissenfels. I do not need to ask for anything more, for I know your tender heart.
Fritz
It was true that Hofrat Ebhard had not much idea what to do next, but he was quite used to this. It did strike him that at Schloss Gruningen his patient had too much company, too much excitement, too many little dogs and cage birds, too many visits from the wildly-talking Hardenberg. He sent her for a few days to a rest-home in which he had a part interest, at Weissensee. It was unfortunately damper and much less airy than Schloss Gruningen. ‘The house is deserted,’ complained Rockenthien, for George also, just as he was beginning to turn into a decent shot, was to be sent away to school in Leipzig. There would be only twenty-six people left at home. His worries he shoved to the back of his mind, as one puts a rat-trap on a shelf, when, for the time being at least, it is no longer needed.
‘Well, what does he say, the Freiherr?’ asked the Mandelsloh.
‘I have written to him,’ said Fritz, ‘and to my mother, and I have explained to them -‘
‘- what they certainly know already. You have told me that even when your friend from Jena, Assistant Practitioner Dietmahler, came to stay with you, your father questioned him on the subject. It’s only Sophgen’s name perhaps, that he won’t know until he gets your letter.’
‘There is something I have to ask you,’ said Fritz urgently. ‘Let us speak heart to heart. Suppose my father were to refuse his permission. Suppose that he tries to separate me from my Philosophy, my heart’s blood. Living here in this paradise you scarcely know what unjust authority means.’
‘I know what it is to be separated,’ said the Mandelsloh.
‘My father himself has been married twice. I am twenty-four years old and there is no law that can be invoked against me in the Electorate of Saxony if I marry without his permission, or indeed against my Sophie, as soon as she reaches her fourteenth birthday. Would she come with me, Friederike, do you think she would defy the world and want no more of it in order to be with me?’
‘On what would you support yourself?’
‘I would earn the little we need as a soldier, a copying-clerk, a journalist, a night-watchman.’
‘These occupations are all forbidden to the nobility.’
‘Under another name -‘
‘- and, I suppose, in another country, if you could get your papers - would you not want to go south?’
‘Ah, Frieke, the south, do you know it?’
‘Far from it,’ said the Mandelsloh, ‘who would ever take me there? I shall have to wait until the Regiment is posted to the land where the lemon-trees flower.’
‘Well, but you have not answered me.’
‘You want her to leave her home, where for as long as she can remember - for God’s sake …’
‘You don’t think, then, that she has the courage?’
‘Courage when you don’t understand what it is that you have to face is no better than ignorance.’
‘Treason, Frieke! Courage is more than endurance, it is the power to create your own life in the face of all that man or God can inflict, so that every day and every night is what you imagine it. Courage makes us dreamers, courage makes us poets.’
‘But it would not make Sophgen into a competent house-keeper,’ said the Mandelsloh. Fritz ignored this and repeated wildly, ‘Would she come with me? Could she bear the parting? - my love would make that easy - would she come?’
‘God forgive me, I’m afraid she might.’
‘Why are you afraid?’
‘I forbid you to ask her.’
‘You forbid me -‘
‘- if I don’t, another will.’
‘But who could that be?’
‘Is it possible that you don’t know?’
42
The Freifrau in the Garden
THE Freiherr von Hardenberg wrote to Kreisamtmann Just.
Who was this von Kuhn, the actual father of this Sophie? They tell me that he is the son of Wilhelm Kuhn, who acquired in 1743, let us say fifty years ago, the proprietorship of Gruningen and Nieder-Topfstedt, and, after that, somehow managed to get a patent of nobility. In good time his son, this Sophie’s father, installs himself at Gruningen. His first wife is called Schmidt; she dies. His second wife is called Schaller, then he dies. The widow takes up with a certain Captain Rockenthien, I think from the Prince of Schwarzburg’s Regiment, thus he in turn becomes the master of Gruningen and Nieder-Topsftedt. I do not think that as yet Rockenthien himself has had the assurance to apply for a patent of nobility.
Kreisamtmann Just replied to Freiherr von Hardenberg.
I can only repeat what I have said before, that I have taught your son all the routine that he needs to know for an official career, and in talking to him I, too, have glimpsed new horizons.
The Freiherr von Hardenberg to Kreisamtmann Just.
Glimpse what horizons you like, but why, in God’s name, did you take him to the Rockenthiens?
He took Fritz’s letter to Leipzig, where he sat with old friends in the club reserved for nobility, stifling in summer, since the members forbade the waiters to open the steam-clouded windows facing the street. There he consulted old friends, as to how he should answer his eldest son. He button-holed the old Count Julius von Schweinitz and the only slightly younger Graf von Loeben, and asked them what they themselves should do if either of their eldest sons should insist on marrying a grocer’s daughter. His mind was, perhap
s, beginning to give way a little.
Fritz had asked his mother to meet him in the garden simply so that they would not be overseen by his father, without reflecting what an extraordinary thing it would be for her to do. Auguste nowadays scarcely ever went out at all, never alone, never at night, and certainly never without the Freiherr’s considered permission. When she told her maid to get out her black shawl, because she was going out by herself into the garden, the old woman began to say her prayers. Still, by the time the Freifrau had made her way down the unfamiliar back stairs, the alert had been given to everyone in the kitchens and the yard. At the bottom of the steps which led into the upper part of the garden the head gardener was waiting in the dusk with a light to open the gate. That was as well, because she had no key and had given no thought to how she should get in.
In the ordinary way she would have excused or explained herself, but not to-night. She was absorbed not so much in anxiety for Fritz as in gratification at being wanted and needed and told to meet him in the garden.
She stood just inside the gate, listening to the shifting and creaking and strange repeated ticking which birds, in their restless half-sleep, make all night. They lodged in the great cherry tree, which produced two hundred pounds of fruit in a good summer, so that at first light they could start gorging themselves before the gardener’s boy arrived. The cherries were almost black, but could still be distinguished from the mass of leaves, gently stirring although there seemed to be no wind.
Fritz was there already, coming towards her up the path from the lower garden. ‘Mother, you know I would not keep you waiting.’
The numberless times he had done so no longer existed. ‘Dear Fritz, have you been to see your father?’
‘Not yet.’
They sat on two of the old wooden chairs left out all summer under the cherry tree. When Fritz had been born, sickly and stupid, she had been given the blame, and had accepted it. When after months of low fever he had become tall and thin and, as they all said, a genius, she had not been given any credit, and had not expected any. He asked her why she was wearing her winter shawl.
‘It’s June, mother. Otherwise I should never have asked you to meet me outside.’
Auguste saw now that the shawl was ridiculous. ‘But Fritz, I feel safe in it.’ He smiled, and did not need to say, ‘You are safe with me.’
An extraordinary notion came to the Freifrau Auguste, that she might take advantage of this moment, which in its half-darkness and fragrance seemed to her almost sacred, to talk to her eldest son about herself. All that she had to say could be put quite shortly: she was forty-five, and she did not see how she was going to get through the rest of her life. Abruptly Fritz leaned towards her and said, ‘You know that I have only one thing to ask. Has he read my letter?’
Immediately she came to herself. ‘Fritz, he surely must have done, but I can’t tell. He has never shown me his letters, but then, God forgive me, I did not show him yours. However, the whole household are to join in a prayer meeting tomorrow evening to consider an important family question.’
‘But, mother, you are on my side, tell me that is so. You approve of what I have done, and what I am going to do. I am following my heart and my soul, you cannot be against me.’
She cried, ‘No! No!’ but when he went on, ‘In that case, why don’t you tell my father what you feel?’ she answered, ‘But I have to obey him, that is natural.’
‘Nonsense, in the world of Nature the female is often stronger than the male, and dominates him.’
‘You mean among the birds and insects,’ said the Freifrau timidly. ‘But, Fritz, they know no better.’
Paying attention only to her mindless tenderness for him, he said, ‘You must tell my father that it is not enough for him only to agree to my engagement. We must have somewhere to live, for Sophie and myself to live, the two of us, alone and together. You understand me, you are not too old to have forgotten.’
Auguste allowed herself to remember what she had felt when she and the Freiherr were left, for the first time, alone and together. But what mattered now was her son, almost, for the moment, in the overwhelming summer night, a stranger. ‘Indeed, yes, Fritz, of course.’
She could be seen to be struggling with a small package, which she had hidden in the pocket of her top under-petticoat.
‘Fritz, my dearest, this is my gold bracelet. Well! I have others, but this is truly mine, it was not given to me by your father, I received it from my godmother when I was twelve, on the occasion of my confirmation. It has been enlarged since then, but only a little, I wish you to have it altered, and made into your engagement rings.’
‘The rings have already been made, mother. Look!’
Sophie sey mein schuz geist.
‘Indeed, mother, I must not take your bracelet, I do not need it, put it away, consider yourself, or keep it, if anything, for Sidonie.’
Thoughtfulness can be much more painful than neglect. The Freifrau, however, had had very few opportunities to learn this.
Back in her room, which was still at the top of the house, she let herself reflect that if only Fritz could always be at home, even with a new wife, she would want no further earthly happiness. Then she prayed for forgiveness, because she must have forgotten, if only for a moment, the welfare of the Bernhard.
The Bernhard himself, however, thought of it unremittingly. ‘What will become of us, Sidonie?’ he asked plaintively. ‘To whom will you yourself be married? You’re difficult, you felt nothing at all for that medical fellow who came on the washday, although he couldn’t stop looking at you. You may well be left a spinster. Karl and Anton, I know, are provided for, and Asmus is supposed to have passed his first exams as a forester …’
‘I have passed them,’ said Erasmus. ‘The principal congratulated me, so did my father, so did Fritz. He sent me a copy of Robinson Crusoe.’
‘So, please lend it to me.’
‘It’s in English,’ said Erasmus. ‘You can’t read English.’
‘That is true,’ said Bernhard with a deep sigh. ‘In those wild forests of words I am lost.’
‘In any case,’ said Anton, ‘you should never lend a book or a woman. There’s no obligation to return either.’
‘Anton, you are trying to talk like Karl,’ said Sidonie. ‘But you have not got it quite right.’
‘It’s simply that I feel the time approaching when a decision will be made about me,’ said the Bernhard, standing up among them with the air of the boy Jesus among the Elders in the print on his bedroom wall.
‘You know you’re to be a page,’ said Anton. ‘The Electoral Courts of Thuringia and Saxony little know what’s coming to them.’
‘I appeal to all of you,’ the Bernhard cried. ‘Who in their senses would think of me as a page? Whatever it is that a page is obliged to do, I know that I could not do it.’
Tears ran down his face, and yet the Hardenbergs were at a kind of ease. Fritz, after he had spoken to his mother, had not stayed even for a night. The Freiherr had departed for a few days, taking with him as a confidential servant the pious Gottfried. Throughout the house there could be sensed, as when music changes not its theme but its key, a little less concentration on the soul, a little more on the body. Today, at half past eight in the morning, they were all still at breakfast. The Freifrau had not come down. Erasmus and Anton sprawled on their chairs. The windows were open down to the ground, the air brought in the scent of the cherry-trees - even of the amarelles, grown for making kirsch, which would not fruit till the autumn - and, from beyond Weissenfels, of the first hay-cutting. All four of them, even the Bernhard, knew that they were not unhappy that morning, but had too much good sense to say anything, even to themselves, about it.
The Freiherr had gone to the Brethren at Neudietendorf to consult the Prediger. At the risk of wordiness, he had spoken of his family properties - bankrupt Oberwiederstadt, the four lost estates, sold to strangers, and Schloben, the beloved Schloben-bei-Jena with its po
plars and mill-stream, where he hoped to live in his retirement, making it a centre for some of the older Brethren.
‘Meanwhile, my eldest son ignores my wishes. If Oberwiederstadt and Schloben were to be settled upon him, I cannot tell what he would do. It would be only decent for him to marry into the nobility and to find a woman with adequate wealth. Don’t tell me I am always thinking about money, it is precisely that I don’t want to have to think about it at all. But since the recent events in France the world is turned upside down, and a father’s necessities no longer weigh with his sons.’
The Prediger nodded, and said that he would give his advice if Hardenberg would undertake to follow it. The Freiherr gave his word. The next day he rode back to Weissenfels with Gottfried. They stopped at no inns, and exchanged very few words. Silence between them said more.
Leipziger Zeitung, 13 July 1796
Christiane Wilhelmine Sophie v. Kuhn
Georg Philipp Friedrich v. Hardenberg
betrothed
Gruningen Weissenfels
43
The Engagement Party
SERVANTS appeared out of the yard gate of the house in the Kloster Gasse. The carrier had brought a pianoforte, ordered by the Freiherr, from Leipzig.
Everyone knows how best to move a piano, or rather, how it should be moved. Not up the front steps, you triple fool! - A little to the right. - It would be easier if we could take off the legs.
When the piano had reached its resting place in the salon and stood unwrapped from its straw and sackcloth, it could be seen to be a thing of beauty, rare in that austere household. Already, however, it had caused trouble enough, since the Father, although he had made up his mind some time ago to replace the harpsichord, had not been able to decide whether to order from Gottlieb Silbermann or Andreas Stein. ‘Silbermann’s pianos are more sonorous,’ wrote the Uncle Wilhelm, ‘but the touch is heavier than Stein’s. For Stein’s, on the other hand, one must send to Vienna.’
The Blue Flower Page 13