This letter profoundly upset the Elector; and when, to his utmost distress, private reports presently began to reach him from Berlin indicating that the trial in the High Court had begun and forecasting that despite all the efforts of the advocate appointed for his defence Kohlhaas would probably end on the scaffold, the unhappy prince decided to make one more attempt, and wrote a personal letter to the Elector of Brandenburg begging him to spare the horse-dealer’s life. He resorted to the argument that the amnesty which the man had been guaranteed made it improper to carry out a death sentence upon him; he assured the Elector that despite the apparent severity with which they had proceeded against Kohlhaas in Saxony it had never been his own intention to have him executed; and he described how inconsolable he personally would be if the protection which Berlin had claimed to be extending to the man turned out unexpectedly, in the event, to be to his greater disadvantage than if he had stayed in Dresden and his case had been decided according to Saxon law. The Elector of Brandenburg, to whom much in this account of the matter seemed ambiguous and obscure, answered that the zeal with which his Imperial Majesty’s attorney was conducting the prosecution meant that any deviation from the absolute rigour of the law, such as the Elector of Saxony desired, was wholly out of the question. He remarked that the concern expressed to him by the Elector of Saxony was excessive, because although Kohlhaas stood arraigned in the Berlin High Court for crimes which the amnesty had pardoned, his accuser was not the Elector of Saxony, who had proclaimed that amnesty, but the supreme ruler of the Empire, who was not in any way bound by it. He also pointed out how necessary it was to make a deterrent example of Kohlhaas in view of the continuing outrages by Nagelschmidt, who with unprecedented audacity had already carried them into the territory of Brandenburg; and he requested the Elector of Saxony, if all these considerations carried no weight with him, to appeal to his Imperial Majesty himself, for if Kohlhaas was to be pardoned, this could only be done on the Emperor’s initiative.
Grief and vexation at all these fruitless attempts plunged the Elector into a fresh illness; and when the Chamberlain visited him one morning, he showed him the letters he had sent to Vienna and to Berlin in his efforts to prolong Kohlhaas’s life and so at least gain time in which to try to take possession of the piece of paper he carried. The Chamberlain fell to his knees before him and implored him by all that was sacred and dear to him to tell him what was written on the paper. The Elector asked him to bolt the door and to sit on his bed; then taking his hand and pressing it to his bosom with a sigh, he began the following narrative: ‘I understand that your wife has already told you how the Elector of Brandenburg and I encountered a gypsy-woman on the third day of our meeting at Jüterbock. The Elector, being a man of lively disposition, decided to play a joke on this weird creature in public and so destroy her reputation for soothsaying, which had just been made the subject of some unseemly conversation at dinner; accordingly he went and stood with folded arms by the table where she was sitting, and demanded that if she was going to tell his fortune she should first give him a sign that could be verified on that same day, for otherwise, he said, he would not be able to believe what she told him even if she were the Roman Sibyl herself. After looking us quickly up and down the woman said that this would be the sign: the big horned roebuck which the gardener’s boy was rearing in the park would come to meet us in this market-place before we had left it. Now you must understand that this roebuck, being intended for the Dresden court kitchens, was kept under lock and key in an enclosure, shaded by the oak-trees in the park and surrounded by a high wooden fence; furthermore, because it contained other smaller game and poultry, the whole park as well as the garden leading to it were kept carefully closed, and it was therefore quite impossible to imagine how this animal could come to us in the square where we were standing and thus fulfil the bizarre prophecy. Nevertheless, suspecting that some trick might be involved, the Elector briefly consulted me and, determined to carry out his jest and discredit once and for all anything she might subsequently say, he sent a message to the palace ordering that the roebuck should be slaughtered at once and prepared for the table on one of the following days. He then turned back to the woman, in front of whom all this had been said aloud, and asked: “Well now! What can you reveal about my future?” The woman, looking into his hand, replied: “Hail, my lord Elector! Your Highness will rule for many years, the house of your ancestors will flourish for many generations, and your descendants will become great and glorious and will achieve power above all the princes and lords of the world!” After a pause in which he looked pensively at the woman, the Elector stepped back to me and said in an undertone that he now almost regretted having sent off the messenger who would confute the prophecy; and while the noblemen in his retinue, with much rejoicing, showered money into the woman’s lap, he asked her, giving her a gold coin from his own pocket as well, whether her greeting to me would have an equally sterling sound. After opening a box that stood by her and slowly and fussily sorting the money into it by denomination and quantity, the woman closed it again, held her hand up as if to shield her eyes from the sun, and looked at me. When I repeated the question and said jestingly to the Elector, as she examined my hand: “She does not seem to have anything pleasant to tell me!” she picked up her crutches, slowly pulled herself up with them from her stool, and with her hands held out mysteriously in front of her came up close to me and whispered plainly in my ear: “No!” – “Indeed!” I exclaimed in confusion, recoiling from her as she sank back on her stool with a cold lifeless stare as if her eyes were those of a figure of marble. “And from what quarter does danger threaten my house?” Taking some paper and charcoal and crossing her knees, the woman asked if I wanted her to write it down for me. And when I, being indeed in some embarrassment because the circumstances left me no choice, answered, “Yes, do that!” she said, “Very well! I shall write down three things for you: the name of the last ruler of your dynasty, the year in which he will lose his throne, and the name of the man who will seize it by force of arms.” And having done so, in front of all the people, she rose to her feet, sealed the paper with some glue which she moistened between her withered lips, and pressed it with a lead signet-ring which she wore on her middle finger. But when I tried to take the paper from her, overcome with inexpressible curiosity as you may well imagine, she exclaimed: “Not so, your Highness!” and turned round and held up one of her crutches. “That man over there with the plumed hat, who is standing behind the crowd on a bench in the church doorway, will sell you this piece of paper, if you want it!” And with that, before I had even rightly grasped what she said, she left me standing there speechless with astonishment, clapped her box shut behind her, slung it over her shoulder, and mingled with the crowd around us; and I saw no more of her. At that moment, to my deep relief I must say, the gentleman whom the Elector had sent to the palace reappeared and informed him with great glee that the roebuck had been slaughtered and dragged before his eyes by two huntsmen into the kitchen. The Elector, in high good humour, put his arm through mine to accompany me from the square and said: “There we are, you see! The prophecy was just a common swindle and not worth our time and money!” But you can imagine our consternation when, even as he was speaking, a cry went up round the whole square, and everyone turned and stared at a huge butcher’s dog which was trotting along towards us from the palace courtyard, its teeth sunk in the neck of the roebuck which it had seized as fair game in the kitchen; and with scullions and skivvies in hot pursuit it dropped the animal on the ground just three paces from us. And thus the woman’s prophecy, the pledge she had given for the truth of everything else she had predicted, was fulfilled indeed, and the roebuck, dead though it was, had come to meet us in the market square. A thunderbolt from the winter sky could not have struck me a more deadly blow than this sight, and as soon as I was free of the company I had been in, I immediately set about discovering the whereabouts of the man with the plumed hat whom the woman had pointed out to
me. But none of my people, though I made them search without pause for three days, could find the slightest trace of him. And now, my dear friend Kunz, only a few weeks ago I saw him with my own eyes in the farmhouse at Dahme!’ And so saying he dropped the Chamberlain’s hand, wiped the sweat from his brow and fell back on to his bed.
The Chamberlain, who saw this incident in quite a different light but thought it would be wasted breath to try to persuade the Elector that his own view of it was mistaken, urged him to try yet again to find some means or other of getting possession of the piece of paper, and then to leave the fellow to his fate; but the Elector replied that no means whatsoever occurred to him, and that nevertheless the thought of not being able to get the paper, or indeed of even seeing all knowledge of its contents perish with the man who had it, tormented him to the point of despair. When his friend asked if attempts had been made to trace the gypsy-woman herself, the Elector answered that he had, under a fictitious pretext, ordered the government to search for the woman throughout the entire principality, which they were still vainly doing to this day, and that in any case, for reasons which he refused to go into, he doubted whether she could ever be traced in Saxony. Now it happened that the Chamberlain, on business connected with several large properties in Neumark inherited by his wife from the High Chancellor Count Kallheim, who had died soon after his dismissal from office, intended to travel to Berlin. And so, as he was genuinely fond of the Elector, he asked after brief reflection whether he would give him a free hand in the affair. When his master warmly grasped his hand and pressed it to his heart, saying: ‘Be as myself in this matter, and get me that piece of paper!’, the Chamberlain delegated his affairs of office, advanced his departure by several days and, leaving his wife behind, set off for Berlin accompanied only by a few servants.
In the meantime, as we have already mentioned, Kohlhaas had arrived in Berlin and on the Elector of Brandenburg’s special instructions was lodged in a prison for persons of rank, where with his five children he had been made as comfortable as possible. Immediately upon the arrival of the Imperial Attorney from Vienna he had been put on trial before the High Court on the charge of breaking the peace of the Empire. Although he objected in his defence that he could not be indicted for the armed invasion of Saxony and the acts of violence which this had involved, since the Elector of Saxony had agreed at Lützen to pardon him on these counts, he was informed that His Imperial Majesty, whose representative was the prosecutor in this case, could not take that into consideration. When all this had been explained to him and he had been assured on the other hand that he would get full satisfaction in his case against Junker Wenzel von Tronka in Dresden, he soon accepted the situation without further demur. Thus it happened that on the very day of the Chamberlain’s arrival, the law was pronounced upon Kohlhaas and condemned him to death by beheading; a sentence which, lenient though it was, no one believed would be carried out in view of the complications of the case – indeed the whole of Berlin, knowing how well-disposed the Elector was towards Kohlhaas, confidently hoped that he would exercise his prerogative and commute it to a mere term of imprisonment, though perhaps a long and severe one. The Chamberlain nevertheless realized that there might be no time to lose if the task assigned to him by his master was to be achieved, and set about it one morning by clearly and circumstantially showing himself, in his ordinary court dress, to Kohlhaas as the latter stood idly at his prison window watching the passers-by. From a sudden movement of the horse-dealer’s head he concluded that he had noticed him, and he also noted with peculiar satisfaction that he involuntarily raised his hand to his breast as if to clasp the locket; surmising what had flashed through Kohlhaas’s mind at that moment, he decided that this was sufficient preparation for the next step in his attempt to gain possession of the paper. He sent for an old woman, a rag-seller whom he had noticed hobbling about on crutches on the Berlin streets among a crowd of other riff-raff plying the same trade, and who seemed to him similar enough in age and dress to the one described to him by the Elector; and assuming that the features of the old crone who had only briefly appeared to hand him the piece of paper would not have impressed themselves deeply on Kohlhaas’s memory, he decided to use this other one in her place and if possible get her to impersonate the gypsy-woman to him. Accordingly, in order to prepare her for the part she was to play, he told her in detail of all that had occurred between the Elector and the said gypsy-woman in Jüterbock, not forgetting to stress particularly the three mysterious items on the paper, since he did not know how much the gypsy had revealed to Kohlhaas; and when he had explained to her that she must mumble out an incoherent and unintelligible speech conveying to him that some plan was afoot to get possession, by trickery or force, of this paper to which the Saxon Court attached such extreme importance, he instructed her to ask the horse-dealer, on the grounds that it was no longer safe with him, to give it back to her for safe keeping for a few crucial days. In return for a promise of substantial remuneration, part of which she required the Chamberlain to pay in advance, the old rag-seller immediately undertook to carry out this task; and as she had for some months known the mother of Herse, the groom killed at Mühlberg, and this woman was allowed by the authorities to visit Kohlhaas occasionally, she succeeded a few days later in bribing the gaoler with a small sum and gaining access to the horse-dealer.
But Kohlhaas, when he saw her enter his room and noticed a signet-ring on her hand and a coral chain hanging round her neck, thought he recognized the same old gypsy-woman who had handed him the piece of paper in Jüterbock; and indeed (for probability and reality do not always coincide) it chanced that something had happened here which we must report, though anyone who so pleases is at liberty to doubt it: the Chamberlain had committed the most appalling of blunders, for in the old rag-seller whom he had taken from the streets of Berlin to play the part of the gypsy-woman, he had picked upon the mysterious gypsy herself whose part he wanted to have played. At any rate this woman, as she leaned on her crutches and stroked the cheeks of the children who had shrunk back against their father at her strange appearance, told Kohlhaas that she had returned from Saxony to Brandenburg quite some time ago, and having heard an incautious question dropped by the Chamberlain in the streets of Berlin about the gypsy-woman who had been in Jüterbock in the spring of the previous year, she had at once pressed forward and offered, under a false name, to do the business he wanted done. The horse-dealer noticed a strange resemblance between her and his deceased wife Lisbeth, so much so that he almost asked her if she was her grandmother; for not only did her features and her hands, which though bony were still finely shaped, and especially the way she gestured with them as she spoke, remind him most vividly of his wife, but he also saw on her neck a mole just like one that Lisbeth had had on hers. With his thoughts in a turmoil he bade the old woman be seated and asked what on earth had brought her to him on an errand from the Chamberlain. With Kohlhaas’s old dog sniffing round her knees and wagging his tail as she scratched his head, the woman replied that what the Chamberlain had commissioned her to do was to tell him to which three questions of importance to the Saxon Court the piece of paper contained a mysterious answer; to warn him of an emissary who had come to Berlin in order to get possession of the paper; and to ask it back from him under the pretext that it was no longer safe round his neck where he was carrying it. But her purpose in coming was to tell him that this threat of having the paper taken from him by trickery or force was no more than a crude and preposterous deception; he need not have the least fear for its safety under the protection of the Elector of Brandenburg in whose custody he was, indeed the piece of paper was much safer with him than with her, and he should take great care not to be parted from it by entrusting it to anyone under whatever pretext. Nevertheless, she concluded, she thought he would be wise to put it to the use for which she had given it to him at the fair in Jüterbock: namely, to heed the proposal conveyed to him by Junker vom Stein at the border, and surrender the paper to
the Elector of Saxony in exchange for life and freedom. Kohlhaas, exulting in the power he thus possessed to strike a mortal wound at his enemy’s heel just as it was grinding him into the dust, answered: ‘Not for all the world, old lady, not for all the world!’ and, squeezing the old woman’s hand, merely asked her to tell him what answers the paper contained to those three momentous questions. The woman lifted his youngest child, who had been squatting at her feet, on to her lap and said: ‘Not for all the world, horse-dealer Kohlhaas, but for this pretty fair-haired boy!’ – and with that she laughed at the child, embraced and kissed him as he stared at her wide-eyed, and with her bony hands took an apple from her pocket and gave it to him. In confusion Kohlhaas said that when they were grown up the children themselves would praise his course of action, and that to keep the paper was the best thing he could do both for them and for their descendants. Besides, he asked, after the way he had been treated, who would guarantee him against being tricked again? Might he not end by having vainly sacrificed the piece of paper to the Elector, just as he had vainly sacrificed his army at Lützen? ‘When a man has once broken his word to me,’ he said, ‘I will have no more dealings with him; and only at your own plain and unequivocal request, my good old woman, will I part with this piece of writing which in so miraculous a way gives me satisfaction for everything I have suffered.’ Putting the child down, the woman said that in many ways he was right and that he could do whatever he pleased. Thereupon she picked up her crutches again and made as if to leave. Kohlhaas repeated his question concerning the contents of the mysterious message, and when she briefly replied that he could after all open it, though it would be mere curiosity to do so, he added that there were a thousand other things he would like to know before she left him: who she really was, how she came by the knowledge she possessed, why she had refused to give the paper to the Elector, for whom after all she had written the words on it, and why she had handed the magic message to him of all the thousands of others, to him who had never wanted her prophecies? Now it happened that at this very moment they heard the noise of some police officers coming up the stairs; the woman therefore, suddenly alarmed by the prospect of being found by them here, answered: ‘Good-bye, Kohlhaas, good-bye! When we meet again, you will find out about all these things!’ and made for the door. She called out to the children: ‘Good-bye, little ones, good-bye!’ and departed after kissing all of them in turn.
The Marquise of O and Other Stories Page 21