by Johann Hebel
Mannheim was, another, ‘From Bruchsal’, a third, ‘From Heidelberg’, and a fourth, ‘From Gochsheim’, and the tailor’s whole being glowed with happiness. ‘And I come from Bretten!’ said the splendid fellow Franz Anton Egetmeier from Bretten, just as Joseph said to the children of Israel in Egypt, ‘I am your brother Joseph!’ And tears of joy and sadness and of sacred love for the homeland welled in all their eyes, and it was difficult to say who was more glad and the more moved, they at finding him or he at finding them. Then the good man led his dear fellow countrymen in triumph to his house and to as good a meal as could be got together in a hurry.
Now he hurried to the governor and asked his gracious permission to keep the Germans in Penza. ‘Anton,’ said the governor, ‘when did I refuse you anything?’ So he ran round town to his friends and acquaintances in search of the best quarters for those for whom he had no space in his own home. He inspected his guests one by one. ‘My friend,’ he said to one,
‘your linen looks the worse for wear. I’ll find half a dozen new shirts for you.’ ‘You need a new tunic too,’ he said to another. ‘Yours can be turned and mended,’ to another, and all of them were treated the same, and at once cloth was cut to size and all twenty-six journeymen worked day and night on clothes for his dear fellow countrymen from the Rhine. In a few days they were all fitted out with new or decent things. Even in an hour of need a good man never takes advantage of a stranger’s kindness; so his guests from the Rhineland said to him, ‘You mustn’t count on us. Prisoners of war have no money. And we don’t know how we’ll be able to repay you the great sums you have spent, or when.’ But the tailor replied, ‘I have sufficient reward if I can help you. Make use of everything I have, make yourselves at home!’ Spoken like an emperor or a king, simple and offhand words, where kindness is clothed in dignity! For not only high princely
birth and magnanimity, ordinary humble love too can quite spontaneously inspire the heart to regal words, not to speak of thoughts. He took them as happy as a child around the town and paraded them in front of his friends. We cannot record here all the good things he did for them. However happy they were, he was never satisfied. Every day he discovered new ways of lightening the pains of captivity and of making life pleasant for them in that strange place in Asia. When there was a royal birthday or nameday back home it was celebrated with a banquet, cheers and fireworks by these loyal subjects there in Asia, on the same day too, only a bit earlier, because the clocks are wrong there. When good news arrived of the allies’ victorious advance in Germany, the tailor was the first to know and passed it on to his children – he now always called them his children – with tears of joy because it brought their release nearer. When the prisoners received money from home their
first care was to repay their benefactor. ‘My sons,’ he said, ‘don’t spoil my pleasure!’ ‘Father Egetmeier,’ they said, ‘don’t hurt our feelings!’ So as not to offend them he presented them with a little bill and then spent the money on providing pleasures for them, down to the last copeck. The money had been meant for something else, but you can’t think of everything. You see, when at last the day of their release arrived their boundless joy was mixed with bitter sorrow at parting, and this was joined by dire distress. For they lacked everything needed for such a long journey through the terrors of the Russian winter and an inhospitable land, and although they were each given thirteen kreuzers for each day they would travel across Russia, that wouldn’t take them very far. So in those final days the tailor, otherwise so cheerful and carefree, went around in silence as if something was on his mind, and he was seldom at home. ‘He’s really upset,’ said his Rhenish guests, but they didn’t notice
anything. But then he bounced in with joy in his stride and beamed and said, ‘Friends, I’ve found a way! Plenty of money!’ What do you think he had done? The good soul had sold his house for two thousand roubles! ‘I’ll find somewhere to live all right,’ he said, ‘just as long as you get back to Germany safe and sound.’ Oh the holy words of the gospel and His love made flesh: ‘Go and sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.’ He will be found above on the right hand when the voice has spoken, ‘Come, ye blessed! I was an hungered and ye gave me meat, I was naked and ye clothed me, I was sick and in prison and ye ministered unto me.’ But to the prisoners’ great relief the sale was revoked. Nevertheless he found a way of getting a few hundred roubles for them and made them take all his valuable Russian furs with them so that they could sell them if they needed money or one of them
needed special care on the journey. Your Family Friend will not attempt to describe their leave-taking. No one who was there could do that. Finally they parted with a thousand blessings and tears of gratitude and love, and the tailor confessed that this was the saddest day of his life. And on their journey back they never stopped talking about their father in Penza, and when they arrived safely in Bialystok in Poland and found money waiting for them there they returned with thanks the sum he had advanced for the journey.
And now you have heard about God’s child Franz Anton Egetmeier, master tailor in Asia.
Tit For Tat
The vicar of Trudenbach was standing at his window one afternoon when he saw the Jew from Brassenheim passing by with his pack on his shoulder. ‘Moses,’ the vicar called out to him, ‘if you find me a good buyer for my horse, it’s worth twenty doubloons, there’ll be something in it for you!’ ‘Well, and what will I get?’ ‘A sack of oats.’ But three weeks passed before the Jew found the right buyer, one who paid six doubloons more for the horse than it was worth, and in the meantime the price of oats soon doubled because the French were buying it up everywhere, at that time they were still buying. So the vicar gave the Jew half a sack instead of a full one. ‘Perhaps I’ll convert him,’ he thought, ‘when he sees that we are fair in our dealings too.’
There was more than one way of taking that. But the Jew took it to be only right and proper. ‘You wait, you goy,’ he thought, ‘you’ll be needing me again!’
A year later the vicar of Trudenbach was standing at his window and the Jew from Brassenheim was passing through the village. ‘Moses,’ the vicar called out to him, ‘I have two fat oxen to sell. If you can find me…’ ‘Well, and what will I get if I find you a good buyer?’ ‘Two big thalers.’
The Jew went to see a bankrupt butcher who had not wielded a cleaver for some time, for all good things must come to an end – not paying bills, for instance. Eventually he told his last two customers, ‘I don’t know how it is, I’ve been so tender-hearted for some time now, I can’t stand the sight of blood any more,’ and he shut up shop. Since then he had a nickname, Butcher Bloodshy, and earned a living, like the compasses-maker, from little ruses and tricks – like this one now. For in him the Jew was looking for and found his man, and he told him what was to be had and how. Two days later they went off to see the vicar. And can you imagine how the butcher was rigged out? In a more or less new coat of brown cloth, long trousers of smart striped fustian, an empty money belt round his middle, a silver ring as heavy as lead on his finger, a similar heart on his shirt beneath a
scarlet neckerchief, and a well-fed dog at his heels – all borrowed on the Jew’s security, nothing that was his own except his red face! The oxen were walked round professionally, prodded and sized up, weighed and measured by eye. ‘So how much are you asking for them?’ ‘Twenty doubloons.’ ‘Seventeen!’ ‘Make it nineteen, landlord,’ said the Jew, ‘you won’t regret it!’ ‘They’re fine oxen,’ said Bloodshy. ‘If I’d known two hours ago when my purse was full I’d have given a couple of doubloons more to get hands on them straight away. But I’ll fetch them on Friday for eighteen.’ And he pulled out his leather purse as if he was going to pay a deposit. The Jew had been whispering something in the vicar’s ear. ‘If you put down two big thalers so he can pay his cook,’ he said to the butcher, ‘you can take the oxen away now for
nineteen. You’re a man of honour
and so is his Reverence the Dean. Bring him the money on Friday.’ The sale was agreed, two big thalers changed hands. ‘Landlord,’ said the Jew, ‘you’ve struck a good deal!’
So Bloodshy drove off the fine fat prizes. But (as most of you, good readers, will have guessed!) the Dean didn’t get his money that Friday.
Four weeks later (or was it six?) the vicar of Trudenbach was standing at his window one afternoon and the Jew from Brassenheim was passing through the village. ‘Moses,’ the vicar called out to him, ‘where’s that landlord of yours? I still haven’t got my money!’ ‘Where he is?’ said Moses. ‘He’ll be waiting for a doubloon to double in value, then he’ll bring you nine and a half instead of nineteen. Will you lose anything that way? Did I lose anything with my oats a year ago?’
The vicar saw the daylight then.
The nicest thing about this story is that it’s true. The Jew. afterwards told it himself and made much of how honestly the butcher went halves with him at the crossroads in the forest. ‘You know what he did?’ he said. ‘He kept the best one for himself and gives me the other one.’
Mister Charles
A merchant in St Petersburg, a Frenchman by birth, was rocking his lovely baby boy on his knees and his expression said he was a wealthy and happy man who took his good fortune as a blessing from God. At that moment a stranger, a Pole, came into the room with four sickly and half frozen children. ‘Here are the children!’ he said. The merchant looked at the Pole in surprise.
‘What am I meant to do with them? Whose children are they? Who sent you here?’ ‘They’re nobody’s now,’ said the Pole, ‘they belong to a woman dead in the snow, seventy hours down the road to Vilna. You can do what you like with them.’ The merchant said, ‘You must have come to the wrong place,’ and Your Family Friend thinks he was right. But the Pole was not put out and answered, ‘If you are Mister Charles I’m in the right place,’ and Your Family Friend thinks he was right too. It was Mister Charles! You see, a Frenchwoman, a widow, had lived prosperous and blameless in Moscow for many years, but when, five years before, the French were in Moscow they treated her too much like one of them for the inhabitants’ liking. For blood is thicker than water, and after she too had lost her home and her wealth in the great fire* and had saved only her five children she had to leave the city and the country as a suspected collaborator. Otherwise she would have gone to St Petersburg to look for her rich cousin. Now, good reader, you will be thinking things are beginning to add up! But she fled to Vilna through the terrible cold and suffered unspeakable hardships, lacking everything needed to make such a long trek bearable, and she fell ill, when in Vilna she met an excellent Russian prince and appealed to him for help. This excellent prince gave her three hundred roubles and, learning that she had a cousin in St Petersburg, let her choose between going on to France or official permission to go back to St Petersburg. She looked doubtfully at her eldest boy, for he was the most sensible and the most ill. ‘Where do you want to go?’ ‘I’ll go wherever you’re going, mother,’ said the boy, and he was right, for he was in his grave before they left. So she got things ready for the journey and arranged with a Pole to take her to her cousin in St Petersburg for five hundred roubles; for he will make up the sum, she thought. But with each day of the long difficult journey she became more ill, and she died on the sixth or seventh day.
‘I’ll go wherever you go,’ the dead boy had said, and the Pole inherited the surviving children from her, and they were able to converse to the limits of what a Pole can understand when a French child speaks Russian or a little Frenchman when someone tries to speak to him in Polish. Not many of you, good readers, would have swapped places with him. He himself was far from happy. ‘What shall Ido?’ he said to himself. ‘Turn back? Where shall I leave the children? Go on? Who shall I take them to?’ Do as conscience dictates, said something within him finally: would you rob the poor children of the only thing they can inherit from their mother, your word you gave her? So he knelt down with the unhappy orphans beside her body and said an Our Father in Polish with them. ‘And lead us not into temptation!’ Then they all threw a tiny handful of snow on their mother’s cold breast and shed a farewell tear, they wanted to do their last duty by her at her burial as best they could, they were wretched orphans now. But as he drove with them along the road to St Petersburg he was easier in his mind for he couldn’t imagine that He who had entrusted the children to him would forsake him. And eventually, when the great city was spread before him, like a hired driver who only asks where he is to stop when he has reached the edge of town, he asked the children, getting them to understand him as best he could, where their cousin lived, and learnt from them, as far as he could understand them, ‘We don’t know.’ What was his name? ‘We don’t know.’ What was their surname? ‘Charles.’ Now you will be thinking things are now adding up even more, and if Your Family Friend had his way Mister Charles would indeed be the cousin, the children would be provided for, and that would be the end of the story. But truth is often stranger than fiction. No, our Mister Charles was not their cousin, but another man of the same name, and to this day nobody knows the real cousin’s name nor whether he was living in St Petersburg or elsewhere. So for two days the poor man went around the town in great perplexity, anxious to dispose of his load of little Frenchmen. But no one took it upon himself to ask, ‘What do you want for two of them?’ And now Mister Charles didn’t even want them for nothing, at that moment he had no intention of keeping just one of them. But when one word led to another and the Pole told him in simple words their sad story, he thought, ‘I’ll take one off his hands,’ and he felt a warm glow within his breast. ‘I’ll take two off his hands,’ he thought, and when the children nestled around him thinking he was their cousin and began to weep in French (for you will of course have noticed that French children weep differenty) Mister Charles saw what they meant in their foreign way, God touched his heart and he felt like a father whose own children are weeping and wailing. ‘In God’s name’, he said, ‘if this is how it is I’ll not pretend it’s no business of mine!’ and he took delivery of the children. ‘Sit down for a while,’ he said to the Pole, ‘I’ll have some soup brought you.’
The Pole tucked into the soup with a good appetite and lighter heart, and put down his spoon. He put down his spoon but didn’t get up, then he got up but stood where he was. ‘Be so good,’ he said at last, ‘and settle with me, Vilna’s a long way from here! The lady agreed on five hundred roubles.’ Mister Charles was a mild man, but at this his face darkened like a sunny meadow in spring when a cloud passes over. ‘I’m not sure I understand you, my friend,’ he said. ‘I’m taking the children off your hands, aren’t you satisfied with that? Do you expect me to pay you carriage as well?’ For it can happen to the most decent and best of men, and not just to merchants, that, without knowing or intending to, they have to begin by haggling a bit, even if it is only with themselves. The Pole answered, ‘My good sir, I won’t tell you now what I think of you! I’ve brought you the children, aren’t you satisfied with that? Did you expect me to drive them here for nothing? Times are bad and money hard to come by!’ ‘Just so,’ said Mister Charles, ‘and that applies to me too. Or do you think I’m so rich that I buy up other people’s children, or so wicked that I trade in them? Do you want them back?’ Again one word led to another and the Pole now learnt to his astonishment that Mister Charles was not the cousin but was only taking in the poor children from pity. ‘If that’s the case,’ he said, ‘I’m not a rich man, and your countrymen, the French, haven’t made me any richer either, but if that’s how things are then I can’t ask any more of you. Just treat the poor things kindly,’ said the noble fellow, and a tear came into his eye as from a heart that was overwhelmed, certainly Mister Charles’s heart was overwhelmed by it. ‘Monsieur Charles,’ he thought, ‘and a poor Polish carrier!’ And the Pole had already begun to kiss the children goodbye, urging them in Polish to be obedient and god-fearing, when Mister Charles said, �
��Wait a moment, my friend! I’m not really so hard up that I can’t pay you for the good job you did bringing this little load here now that I have accepted the consignment!’ And he gave him the five hundred roubles. So now the children are provided for, the carrier has been paid, and if when we got to the city gates one or two of you, good readers, doubted whether the cousin could be found and whether he would play his part, you now see that divine providence did not even need him.
The Glove Merchant
A dealer who wanted to bring a crate of fine gloves from France over into Germany used the following ploy. There’s a law, you see, that anyone bringing goods into or out of France has to declare their value at the French customs post. If he declares them at a reasonable value, good, then he pays the duty, it’s so much or just that. But if the customs officer sees that a merchant or shopkeeper has named much too low a price so as to pay too little duty, then that customs man can say, ‘Very well, I’ll give you that plus ten percent!’ and then the merchant has to accept it. The tradesman gets the money and the officer gets the goods, and they are then auctioned in Colmar or Strassburg or some such town. It’s a cunning scheme, you can’t quarrel with it. But cunning can always be outdone! A merchant who wanted to bring two crates of gloves over the Rhine came to an understanding with a friend beforehand. Then he put only right-hand gloves,
two by two, into one crate, and all the left-hand ones into another crate. The left-hand gloves he smuggled over on a misty night. What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over! He arrived at the customs post with the others. ‘What’s in that crate?’ ‘Gloves from Paris.’ ‘Their value?’ ‘Two hundred francs.’ The customs man felt the gloves. The leather was soft, it was strong too, the stitches were finely sewn, clearly they were worth four hundred francs of anyone’s money. ‘I’ll give you two hundred and twenty francs for them,’ said the customs man, ‘Hand them over!’ The dealer said, ‘You’ve made an offer I can’t resist.’ Ten percent is a profit after all! So he pocketed two hundred and twenty francs and abandoned the crate. The next Friday the gloves were offered at auction in the market hall in Speyer, at that time under the French. ‘Who will bid me more than two hundred and twenty?’ The interested parties inspected the gloves. ‘It seems to me,’ said the dealer’s friend, ‘that we’re a little short on left ones.’ ‘Parbleu!’ said someone else, ‘they’re all right-hand gloves!’ Nobody made a bid. ‘Two hundred, anyone? One hundred and fifty? One hundred? Eighty, anyone?’ Nobody made a bid. ‘You know something?’ said the dealer’s friend eventually, ‘perhaps a lot of one-armed men will return from the war.’ It was in the year 1813. ‘I’ll give sixty francs for them,’ he said. And they were knocked down to him. As for the customs officer from over the Rhine, he was livid with rage. But later the friend who had been put up to buy at the auction smuggled the right-hand gloves over the Rhine too (what the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over), and in Waldangeloch he and the dealer sorted both lots into pairs again, a left and a right, and they sold them for a very good price at the fair in Frankfurt. But the dealer had already made one hundred and forty francs on the sale to the customs man, and saved the duty. Now, how do the Scriptures put it? ‘I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.’