Читать книгу The Blue Flower - Candia McWilliam, Penelope Fitzgerald - Страница 13

WHILE they were living at Oberwiederstadt, the Hardenbergs did not invite their neighbours, and did not accept their invitations, knowing that this might lead to worldliness. There was also the question of limited means. The Seven Years’ War was expensive – Friedrich II was obliged to open a state lottery to pay for it – and for some of his loyal landholders, quite ruinous. In 1780 four of the smaller Hardenberg properties had to be sold, and at another one, Möckritz, there was an auction of the entire contents. Now it stood there without crockery, without curtains, without livestock. As far as the low horizon the fields lay uncultivated. At Oberwiederstadt itself, you saw through the narrow ancient windows row after row of empty dovecotes, and a Gutshof too vast to be filled, or even half-filled, which had once been the convent chapel. The main building was pitiable, with missing tiles, patched, weather-beaten, stained with water which had run for years from the loosened guttering. The pasture was dry over the old plague tombstones. The fields were starved. The cattle stood feeding at the bottom of the ditches, where it was damp and a little grass grew.

Smaller and much more agreeable was Schlöben-bei-Jena, to which the family sometimes made an expedition. At Schlöben, with its mill-stream and mossy oaks, ‘the heart,’ Auguste said tentatively, ‘can find peace’. But Schlöben was in almost as much difficulty as the other properties. There is nothing peaceful, the Freiherr told her, about a refusal to extend credit.

As a member of the nobility, most ways of earning money were forbidden to the Freiherr, but he had the right to enter the service of his Prince. In 1784 (as soon as the existing Director had died) he was appointed Director of the Salt Mines of the Electorate of Saxony at Dürrenberg, Kösen and Artern, at a salary of 650 thaler and certain concessions of firewood. The Central Saline Offices were at Weissenfels, and in 1786 the Freiherr bought the house in the Kloster Gasse. It was not like Schlöben, but Auguste wept with relief, praying that her tears were not those of ingratitude, at leaving the chilly solitude and terribly out-of-date household arrangements of Oberwiederstadt. Weissenfels had two thousand inhabitants – two thousand living souls – brickyards, a prison, a poor-house, the old former palace, a pig-market, the river’s traffic and the great clouds reflected in the shining reach, a bridge, a hospital, a Thursday market, drying-meadows and many, many shops, perhaps thirty. Although the Freifrau had no spending allowance of her own and had never been into a shop, indeed rarely left the house except on Sundays, she received a faltering glow, like an uncertain hour of winter sunshine, from the idea of there being so many things and so many people quite close at hand.

It was at Weissenfels that the Bernhard was born, in the bitter February of 1788. Fritz by then was nearly seventeen, and was not at Weissenfels on this occasion, but at his Uncle Wilhelm’s, in Lucklum in the Duchy of Braunschweig-Wolfenbuttel. The boy had outgrown his tutor, who had to sit up late into the night reading mathematics and physiology in order to catch up with him. ‘But this is not wonderful, after all,’ the uncle wrote. ‘Tutors are a poor-spirited class of men, and all this Herrnhuterei is nothing but hymn-singing and housework, quite unsuitable for a von Hardenberg. Send Fritz, for a time at least, to live in my household. He is fifteen or sixteen, I don’t know which, and must learn to understand wine, which he can’t do at Weissenfels, where the grapes are only fit to make brandy and vinegar, and to find out what grown men talk about when they are in decent company.’ The Freiherr was, as always, infuriated by his brother’s remarks and still more by their tone. Wilhelm was ten years older than himself, and appeared to have been sent into the world primarily to irritate him. He was a person of great distinction – ‘in his own eyes’ the Freiherr added – Governor of the Saxon division of the German Order of Knighthood (Lucklum branch). Round his neck, on very many occasions, he wore the flashy Maltese cross of the order, which was also embroidered, in plush and braid, on his greatcoat. The Hardenberg children knew him as the ‘Big Cross’, and His Mightiness. He had never married, and was graciously hospitable not only to his fellow landowners but to musicians, politicians, and philosophers – those who should be seen round the table of a great man, to offer their opinions and to agree with his own.

After a stay of only a few months, Fritz was returned to his father at Weissenfels, taking with him a letter from his uncle.

Lucklum, October 1787

I am glad that Fritz has recovered himself and got back on to the straight path, from which I certainly shall never try to remove him again. My way of life here is pitched too high for his young head. He was much too spoiled, and saw too many strange new people, and it could not be helped if a great many things were said at my table which were not helpful or salutary for him to know …

The Freiherr wrote to his brother to thank him for his hospitality, and to regret that he could not thank him more. The white waistcoat, breeches and broad-cloth coat which had been made for Fritz by his uncle’s tailor, apparently because those he had brought with him were not considered smart enough for the dinner-table, would now be sent to the Moravian Brethren for distribution to charity. There would be no occasion for him to wear them in Weissenfels, where they lived simply.

‘Best of Fritzes, you were lucky,’ said fourteen-year-old Erasmus.

‘I am not sure about that,’ said Fritz. ‘Luck has its rules, if you can understand them, and then it is scarcely luck.’

‘Yes, but every evening at dinner, to sit there while these important people amused themselves by giving you too much to drink, to have your glass filled up again and again with fine wines, I don’t know what … What did they talk about?’

‘Nature-philosophy, galvanism, animal magnetism and freemasonry,’ said Fritz.

‘I don’t believe it. You drink wine to forget things like that. And then at night, when the pretty women come creaking on tiptoe up the stairs to find the young innocent, and tap at your door, TRIUMPH!’

‘There were no women,’ Fritz told him. ‘I think perhaps my uncle did not invite any.’

‘No women!’ cried Erasmus. ‘Who then did the washing?’