Читать книгу The Queen's Physician - Edgar Maass - Страница 9

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D R. STRUENSEE FELT that life owed him greater rewards than those available to a provincial sawbones. Others made no move to improve his condition. Well, then, he thought, I shall do something about it on my own account.

Over a considerable period he tried methodically to improve his knowledge of extra-medical matters. In time he felt pretty much at home in the speculative regions of political history, economics and philosophy, as well as in geography and biology. Gradually, having sat up half the night racing through every book he could lay his hands on, he acquired a moderately encyclopedic fund of knowledge. He was greatly aided by a powerful memory and a talent for quickly grasping essentials. However, though extensive enough, his knowledge inevitably lacked depth. It was not genuinely anchored within his personality, it had not been disciplined by reflection and firsthand experience, fixed by long repetition and elaboration. His learning, so to speak, was like a floating island, pleasing to look at, alluring of contour, but nothing to build on.

The Doctor himself realized that random knowledge alone guaranteed nothing. Moreover, pedantry went against his grain. And so he strove experimentally to pass along the fruits of his erudition in popularly understandable forms. For a while he nourished an ambition to be a poet. He tried his hand at a number of odes, satires, drinking and love songs, in imitation of Horace, Juvenal and Catullus. But as he himself ruefully saw, his rhymes were hopelessly inept. He consigned them to the fire, saving only a few of them in his desk drawer, where he hid them among prescriptions and patients’ accounts.

Since poetry was too coy, he turned his attention to prose, and discovered that he was much more at home in this pedestrian field. Yet even here he could not hope to compete, he found, with his French and English models. Finally he landed where every scribbler who lacks sound wind must land, in the manufacture of feuilletons.

Once Dr. Struensee had found his aptitude for this pleasant and irresponsible genre—the period excelled in critical and moral sketches—his next step was to undertake the publication of a magazine with the backing of an Altona bookseller. He was on the way to being another Dr. Johnson or Lessing, so he thought, when fate rudely intervened. The broad, dignified figure of Pastor Goeze loomed between him and home. Each Sunday this Hamburg worthy, gowned in his long robe, his many double chins embedded in stiff ruffles, thundered to a frightened congregation from the pulpit of St. Catherine’s. One of these shattering Sundays the Pastor denounced an article entitled “Contributions to Spiritual and Practical Instruction,” written by none other than Dr. Struensee for his little magazine.

Pastor Goeze blasted the article as an immoral, free-thinking piece of filth. He branded the author as depraved, a criminal menace to the community. Dr. Struensee, it appeared, had urged that illegitimate children be accorded the same human consideration, legal rights and education as legitimate ones, on the grounds that they were in no sense responsible for the shortcomings of their parents.

What had particularly irritated Pastor Goeze was not so much the author’s manifest doubt of the validity of original sin, nor his opinion that illegitimate children should receive better treatment. It was the article’s covert appeal for a more relaxed moral code, an appeal directed mainly to the female half of the community, and so doubly inclined to promote moral decline. What, the Pastor reasoned, would prevent young men and women from having the freest of relationships, if the fruit of their casual pleasure were given the same legal and spiritual status as the productions of the marriage bed? All in all Dr. Struensee’s article struck the righteous Pastor as a brazen assault on the world order prescribed by God. According to this predetermined order, as the Pastor understood it, delinquency should be followed as a matter of course by punishment and public humiliation. The Pastor was well aware that among the aristocracy and at court there was no lack of bastards. There a different outlook prevailed. All the more reason, therefore, he thought, to fear that the same defects would arise in the bourgeois world. In good conscience he strove to prevent any such vile contingency, with vigorous threats of hellfire and a nasty reception on judgment day.

Pastor Goeze’s intervention was a piece of bad luck for Dr. Struensee. It injured Struensee’s professional standing, for one thing. Indeed, it made him liable to serious reprisal. The Danish government might easily deny him the right to practice medicine on account of his being an immoral person. With this dreadful possibility in mind he wrote several humble petitions to Minister Bernstorff in Copenhagen, hoping to ward off the worst. His father, who now held the important position of religious superintendent of Schleswig, reluctantly countersigned these anxious epistles. Some of the Doctor’s friends lobbied in his behalf in influential Copenhagen society. In the end the incident passed as a storm in a teacup, when the Doctor solemnly promised never again to stray into forbidden territory.

Struensee’s “Contributions to Spiritual and Practical Instruction” was abruptly proscribed. The next issue of the magazine was already in type, and the unhappy bookseller did not want to kill it and write off his losses. He tried to salvage the situation by giving the magazine a new title—Out of the Realm of Wit and Knowledge. But the Doctor dared not contribute further. There was a superfluity of such little magazines in any case, and in the end the publication, like so many others before and since, died a natural death from a lack of readers.

Dr. Struensee’s literary flight would have had no further consequences except for the numerous aristocratic families living on their country estates in the vicinity of Hamburg and Altona. The petty landed nobles of Holstein were not rich people. Their income did not suffice to support life in Copenhagen. They depended rather precariously on income drawn from the land. Their sons served as officer-candidates and lieutenants in the Danish, Prussian and Hanoverian armies, or tried to get a footing for themselves as officials in the various states. The many daughters had the worst of it in this peculiarly provincial situation. Their chances of marriage were minimized by reason of the constant migration of the young men. A minority among them, prettier and more spirited than their sisters, wrenched themselves free, not infrequently with the aid of venturesome itinerant males, with whom they eloped, to fashion a career of sorts for themselves, or perhaps to end in the brothels of Hamburg, Paris, Copenhagen or even London. But the vast majority simply sat at home with their families. They assisted at the frequent pregnancies of their more fortunate married sisters, they took care of the younger children, managed the servants, the peasants, the cattle. At last, when they had finally become irretrievable spinsters, they withdrew to one of the many old ladies’ homes for the well-born. There they spent the rest of their days in a condition of beguinage, living in two rooms where they kept busy with needlework, gossip and coffee parties.

These stay-at-home elements had a great deal of time on their hands, and since most of them were fairly well brought up, and beyond reading and writing had learned, perhaps, to speak French and a little English, to play some instrument and sketch a little, they devoted their leisure to the fine arts and literature. A predilection for Young’s “Night Thoughts” was common in Holstein county society, likewise for Gellert’s songs and the lays of Ossian. Even the pious Klopstock and his long-winded “Messiah” were warmly received. Others, especially a younger group, were drawn in a spirit of revolt to the French rationalists. Diderot’s encyclopedist writings, Voltaire’s dramas and Candide, and above all the widely admired Jean Jacques Rousseau passed from hand to hand until they were tattered rags, their pages tear-stained as they were loaned from castle to castle, bedchamber to bedchamber. Nor could these life-hungry sprigs of nobility have their fill of topical writings. They eagerly devoured everything from the Hamburger Korrespondenten to the Courier de France. To forget the excruciating boredoms of rustication they relived imaginatively all the happenings of the great world. They gloated over accounts of earthquakes and court balls and executions. They all but committed to memory descriptions of the hunting costume worn by the Landgraf von Hessen. And their interest was never more pleasingly tickled than when they ferreted out some intimation of free-thinking among the crabbed print.

Dr. Struensee’s “Contributions to Moral and Practical Instruction” had not escaped their watchful eyes. They were naturally interested in any such topic as the care of illegitimate children, in a purely theoretical way, of course. They judged the article to be excellent, just suited to stimulate lively private conversations from which males were barred. Not only was it humanitarian and liberal; it exhaled a delightfully pleasant eroticism. Chief Clergyman Goeze’s denunciation sharpened their partisanship. The inflammable tinder of their hearts promptly burst into flames of dedication when they discovered that the author was a qualified doctor, with dark-blond hair and blue eyes, a gallant block of a fellow with fine manners despite his burgher origins. In sum, Dr. Struensee took shape in their minds as a most sympathetic victim of the same niggardly spirit of reaction which kept them immured out in the country among swarms of grubby children and stupid herds of cows.

Much additional information about Dr. Struensee was spread throughout the Holstein countryside by no less a personage than Count Karl Asche von Rantzau, formerly Major-General, A.D., of the Russian service. The Count, with his iron-gray hair and his tall figure, was something of a ladies’ man. In fact, too much conjugal response had originally driven him from the nest. He had wandered abroad and finally come to rest in Russia as another German officer in the guards of Catherine the Great. The Tsarina, of course, was fond of large men such as Count Rantzau.

But in this current epoch the Count had returned to his wife and child in Holstein, on the way suffering a minor, but fateful, accident. Having a jolly time for himself in Hamburg, Count Rantzau slipped the full length of the cellar stairs of the Eimbeck’schen Haus. A statue of Bacchus eating grapes was posted unwisely at the entrance. This unyielding object the Count struck head on. The accident, everyone thought, was highly symbolic.

A nearby doctor was called, a certain Dr. Struensee. With three deft stitches he sewed up the gash on his drunken patient’s forehead. Not only that. The next morning Struensee appeared at the Zum Koenig von Preussen to inquire about the military gentleman’s health. The patch was still stuck to Rantzau’s head and he was suffering from a monumental hangover. At first the Count behaved like a caged tiger freshly caught, but soon relaxed when the Doctor got off a series of anecdotes told with a nice mixture of professional gravity, respect for his betters and common human sympathy. After a cup of coffee and several liqueur pick-me-ups the ice was definitely broken. In his snoring, guardsman’s voice Rantzau accommodated with some of his own colorful adventures in foreign parts. He told how, in Rome, dressed as a priest, he had seduced a pious contessa. In Danzig he had cheated a merchant out of three hundred gulden. In his repertoire there was no end of peccadillos. Rantzau was a man who could look back on a lively, if not exactly honorable, life. As the scion of a noble house he had worked very hard at being a hellrake. He had betrayed his friends, stolen whatever he could lay his hands on and even cheated at cards.

Dr. Struensee, the minister’s son, had little to offer in return for these amazing confidences. He was almost abashed by his highborn patient’s tone of ribald self-amusement. Then he was inspired to mention his own altercation with Chief Clergyman Goeze.

Rantzau was quite taken by the Doctor’s free-thinking habits. He praised his epicurean outlook. In the end they parted as good friends. They shook hands with a will and promised not to lose sight of each other. This protestation occurred immediately after the Count had borrowed ten reichsthalers from the Doctor, for him a formidable sum, for Rantzau a trifle, at least judging by the way he let the gold piece slide into the pocket of his gray silk vest of military cut. In actual fact, notwithstanding his resounding title and his glamorous past in the Tsarina’s guards, the Count had hardly a penny to his name. Dr. Struensee’s loan enabled him, indeed, to pay his bill at the Koenig von Preussen and his fare on the mail coach, into which vehicle he carelessly swung himself after pinching the chambermaid’s cheeks in lieu of a tip.

And so Rantzau rumbled away through the Dammtor of Hamburg. Heralded by the merry blast of the coachman’s horn he bounced on through Holstein to his family seat, the Schloss Ascheberg. The battered enfant terrible was welcomed by the women of the family with squeals and tears of joy. With him Rantzau brought something that they yearned for much more than for hats, clothes, chocolates and perfumes—news from the outer world. The kind of news that he brought with him was not meager newspaper novelties, dry advices at second and third hand, but news fresh from the lips of a man who had actually dallied with the Tsarina in Peterhof, who had snapped the Duchess of Courland’s garter in place above her impassioned knee, having found his way with military ingenuity through the folds of silken petticoat barring the road to that delicious territory, who had led the Marquise of Pompadour, so he said, by the elbow into her very own boudoir, to admire Boucher’s paintings on the walls. Yes, they depicted exquisite scenes, there was no other word.

Many of his intimate revelations were not really fit for ladies’ ears. No matter, Count Karl Asche von Rantzau was a broad-minded, easy-going man. The pleased scream of girlish voices was often heard in the salon of the Schloss Ascheberg when the Count entertained his nieces, cousins, sisters-in-law and other assorted female friends. The dear things blushed to the roots of their hair at what they heard, but just the same they strained every nerve to hear as he doled out his reminiscences.

It was a local tradition that the young women should gather about “Uncle Rantzau.” They embroidered vests and handkerchiefs for him, they sewed lacy wrist-frills onto his shirtsleeves. They plundered their fathers’ wine-cellars for him, and for him they unearthed thalers secreted in a stocking in bureau drawers underneath the linen. When the Count accepted the thalers it was his custom to pass them lightly under his nose, to smell, so he declared, the faint perfume of their owners still clinging to the metal. Gold was said to have no odor, he pointed out, but that was plainly a lie. And then, with an air, he slipped them into his pocket. But the tireless sponge got more than material gifts from his coterie. They competed for his attention, they breathed their ideas on the arts, the sciences and religion into his hairy ears. He roused their feminine stubbornness, in his company they were prickled into showing off their learning. Their views, they assured him, derived from famous sources. The Count graciously let the Muses have their day. He would admit that being a simple soldier he felt ill at ease amidst so much high thinking. He was a past master at chaffing his way along, he knew how to slide from under. “My dear children,” he would snore, “if that’s what interests you so much, you should listen to my friend, Dr. Struensee. Why, my dears, he talks better than a book, upon my soul.”

What! The inimitable uncle, then, even knew Dr. Struensee! It was a discovery of the first rank. Rantzau did not really understand why the dear children should get so excited about an obscure doctor. But recalling that his wound had been cared for gratis, that he owed Struensee ten reichsthalers, and realizing that here was an easy chance for him to shine by reflected glory, he polished up the story of how he met the Doctor in Hamburg. He praised Struensee’s wit, his physique, his elegant manner. The young ladies sighed. Ah, if we could only see him, they told the Count.

“Nothing easier,” said Rantzau. “Simplest matter in the world.”

“Uncle Rantzau, you’re joking again,” the girls trilled. “We think you’re mean.”

“A man is as good as his word,” said Rantzau, and for once in his life actually meant it.

The Count soon found an opportunity to draw Struensee into his circle. One of the Count’s sisters-in-law, a young lady in her twenties, became very ill. She was suffering from the after-effects of a difficult delivery and seemed unable to get back on her feet. Her husband and relatives were worried, thinking she might have consumption. They debated whether she should be taken to Copenhagen for examination, or whether royal medical councillor Berger should be brought to her from the city. Either alternative would cost a fortune. Rantzau saw his chance and suggested Dr. Struensee. “A distinguished physician, a phenomenal comer in medicine, much superior to Berger,” he announced. “He’s an enlightened man, familiar with all the latest methods. And he’s cheap, too. On my word, he’ll not only cure her, he’ll do it for practically nothing.”

The issue was discussed for days in family conclave. In the end Rantzau had his way. And so, one fine morning a heavy black coach came driving up to the long, white manor house and out sprang the renowned Doctor. Struensee was in fine fettle, ready for anything. He was taken directly to the patient. Pale from months of confinement and lying virtually suffocated by pillows and covers in a tightly sealed room, the young mother was horribly upset at first by the sheer vitality of the Doctor. She blushed furiously as he marched up to the bed, hat under his arm, blond hair unpowdered. It almost seemed as if health flooded back into her cheeks at the mere sight of him.

Struensee assumed a confident medical stance beside the bed, while the uneasy relatives hovered behind. He felt the patient’s pulse, he sounded her lungs, tapping the naked, ivory back. Gently he shook his head, displeased. He looked about the room. Then without a word he threw up the windows, one after the other. The early summer morning poured into the room. In came a freshet of sweet air, spiced by rose bloom and birdsong.

“Mon dieu!” said plump Aunt Amalie von Rantzau, who had come from the old ladies’ home at Itzhoe to care for her niece. “Do you think that’s the right thing to do? Draughts are terrible for sick lungs. We all know that, sir!”

“Madame has the soundest lungs in the world,” retorted the Doctor. “What the lungs lack is something to breathe.”

“Don’t you think we ought to have Berger after all,” Aunt Amalie whispered. “This man’s going to be the death of her, mark my words.”

“This afternoon Madame can lie out on the terrace,” said Struensee. He bent quietly over the sick woman and enfolded her fine white hand in his long, cool brown one.

“But that will spoil her complexion,” groaned Aunt Rosalie, another spinster member of the family. “I know it will, I just know it.”

“Madame can wear a large straw hat if the sun is too strong for her,” said Struensee.

“A straw hat!” exclaimed Aunt Amalie. “How vulgar! Do you want the girl to look like a peasant’s horse?”

“Even the ladies of Fontainebleau wear straw hats, I believe,” said Struensee. “Is that not correct, Your Excellency?”

“You’re quite right, Struensee,” said Rantzau. “I’ve seen the Marquise herself in a straw hat, one with rose-colored ribbons.”

As they were all leaving the sick room Aunt Amalie managed to get in a last word to Aunt Rosalie. “That man is no doctor,” she said. “Why, he doesn’t even smell like one! The way he talks you might think that getting well was just having a good time. Did you notice, Rosalie? He didn’t even bleed the poor dear. We might as well brace ourselves for a funeral.”

Yet curiously enough the patient did regain her health. On the terrace, between Struensee and Rantzau and surrounded by a swarm of visitors, she rediscovered normality and got a grip on it. She could not help but see how the girls fluttered about Struensee. She herself fell a little bit in love with him and experienced mild pangs of jealousy when the others made off with “her doctor” into the garden. This happened a good deal. They would coax Struensee down to the pond and get him to row them over the smooth, reedy, willow-garlanded surface, while they sang songs and coquetted. The patient tried hard to get well that she might do the same. And get well she did.

By St. John’s Eve in late June she was strong enough to lean on Struensee’s arm and watch the fireworks, spraying up from a float on the pond. That evening when he brought her back to the house he kissed her lightly on the neck, which, of course, was rather overdoing his medical obligations. Still, he refused to accept any fee for his efforts, since the case had been so mild. His stay at the Schloss Ascheberg had been so very pleasant, he declared, that he considered himself more than well paid.

Struensee knew something about the feminine soul. His period was a feminine one. The sickness of the times was “ennui.” Beneath the suave surface flourished a hidden doubt of all elegance. Behind the mask lurked a sickly hatred of accepted modes, the varietism, superficiality, the elaborate playfulness, the inane pursuit of charming sensations. But this hatred was never quite able to break through the enameled surface. So long had the mask been worn that it had become almost second nature. At the same time, however, despite this secret self-disgust, these same people cherished a lingering affection for the sugary and the sentimental. In a loose sense the period was schizoid, all but split into two irreconcilable halves. The more dry and objective the intellect, the more estranged from life the sensibilities. Struensee vaguely believed that at the bottom ennui was a kind of fear, a chronic premonition that nothing less than violence could ever weld the human soul together again.

In his own person Struensee embodied the elegance and charm of his times, these attributes qualified by his intense desire to get along in the world. The will to success was in his eyes when they suddenly darkened. Ambition betrayed itself in his impatient gestures, in his plangent voice. Many other men harbored the same desire to make something big of themselves. But their quest expressed itself, unlike Struensee’s, in the established forms. They practised the stereotyped, Chinese smile, the whispered tone, the exaggerated politeness. Their way was intrigue and cabal, a cat-like insinuation into the sources of power and status. Guile won them money and offices. Theirs was the soft approach, an approach that quick as lightning could turn into tigerish assault.

Women who called Struensee to their bedside felt the difference in him, the impact of a new, romantic attitude. The young physician had an indefinable something about him that, they knew instinctively, could end their ennui. How fine a passage from Rousseau or Voltaire sounded on his tongue, so much better than when they read the same thing in a pretty volume in half leather set off with gold. How full and fresh and genuine the Doctor’s laughter, how superior to the soft tittering they were accustomed to hear. How exciting it was when his strong, slender hand reached out unaffectedly to enclose their own!

Small wonder, then, that after the miraculously rapid cure of the Countess Rantzau, Dr. Struensee’s reputation became a byword throughout Holstein. Whenever a young lady lacked a healthy appetite, whenever a young wife coughed or awoke in the morning with a light fever, at once she would think of Struensee and secretly welcome the little indisposition making it possible to call him to the house. Dr. Struensee’s hired coach presently was seen rocking here and there and in all directions over the roads of Holstein, as far away as Schleswig, even as far as Ditmarsch and Tondern, moving from one white country place and toy castle to the next. The Doctor himself sat back deep in the leather cushions and read. His name became known even among the bondsmen and peasants along the way, for his fame filtered down to the common folk by way of the mamselles and the serving girls. These lowly admirers wiped the sweat from their foreheads and bowed deeply to the tall man in black, remembering to sweep their hats from their heads. And the peasant girls, of course, waved and danced as the Doctor clattered by.

Almost all of Struensee’s patients fell in love with him, giddy fifteen-year-olds and stiff spinsters in their seventies. The flowers he brought his patients—leaving flowers was one of his typical gestures—in many a castle lay carefully pressed between the leaves of The New Héloïse or “Night Thoughts.” His bravely scribbled prescriptions often found their way under a cambric pillow rather than to the apothecary.

Being a man of taste the Doctor bought himself new clothes, simple ones suited to his bourgeois station, yet made of the finest worsted. He also wore fine linen, but without lacy trim. Almost invariably he now ate his meals as a welcome guest in country manor dining rooms, and when at home frequented the Hotel Zum Koenig von Preussen. He made himself a connoisseur of wines and was able to tell his patients’ husbands that the best burgundy came from Lueneburg, bordeaux of the finest bouquet from Luebeck, the driest sherry from Hamburg.

It was a delight to watch him open an oyster, pry rosy flesh from a lobster’s claw, heap a mound of caviar on his round cake and sprinkle it ever so lightly with lemon juice.

Mutton was forgotten, so, too, cabbage and turnips. And in the closet his man of bones gathered dust.