If I go on like this, you won’t know much more when I am through than you did at the beginning. Very well, then, listen. I will do my best to give you the full details.
I wrote to you not long ago that I had made the acquaintance of Magistrate S. and how he asked me to visit him soon at his retreat, or rather, in his little private kingdom. I didn’t do anything about it at the time and might never have gone if chance had not given me the opportunity to discover what a treasure lay hidden in that quiet spot.
Some of our young people had arranged a dance in the country, and I decided to go. I asked one of the young ladies here—a nice, good-looking but rather insignificant girl—to go with me, and it was agreed that I order a carriage for us and her cousin and that we pick up Charlotte S. on the way. “You are going to meet a very pretty girl,” my partner told me, as we drove through a clearing to the lodge. “Watch out that you don’t fall in love with her,” her cousin said. “And why shouldn’t I fall in love with her?” I wanted to know. “Because she is engaged,” my partner explained, “to a very worthy man who is away just now on business. His father died and he has to attend to the settlement of a quite considerable estate.” The information did not make much impression on me.
As we drove into the courtyard, the sun was low above the hills. It was oppressive, and the women were afraid that the leaden clouds gathering on the horizon presaged a thunderstorm. I pretended to know much more than I do about the weather and succeeded in reassuring the ladies, although I was beginning to wonder myself if our festivities were not going to be upset.
I had already alighted from the carriage when a servant girl, who had come to the gate, begged us to wait a moment. “Miss Lotte” would be out right away. I walked across the courtyard toward the attractive house, and when I had gone up the steps and through a doorway, I came upon the most charming sight imaginable. Six children, from about eleven to two, were swarming around a very pretty girl of medium height.
She had on a simple white dress with pale pink bows on the sleeves and at her breast, and she was holding a loaf of black bread and cutting a slice for every one of her little ones, according to their ages and appetites. She gave each his share with the most enchanting graciousness, and the children cried out their “thank you’s” to her absolutely at their ease, stretching out their little hands for their slice before she had even had a chance to cut it. Then they jumped off happily with their supper or, each according to his nature, walked away quietly in the direction of the courtyard to see the strange persons and the carriage in which their Lotte would soon drive away.
“I must apologize,” she said, “that you had to come in for me and that I am keeping the ladies waiting, but dressing, and all the little household duties that had to be attended to before leaving, made me forget to give my children their supper, and they don’t want anyone to give it to them but me.”
I said something, a casual compliment, but all the while my whole being was absorbed with the sight of her, the sound of her voice, her behavior. When she ran into her room to fetch her gloves and fan, I barely had time to recover my composure. The little ones eyed me suspiciously with sidelong glances, and kept their distance. I went up to the youngest, the fairest child you could imagine. He drew away from me, but just then Lotte came out of her room and said, “Shake hands with your cousin, Louis,” and the boy did, quite naturally, and I could not resist kissing him heartily in spite of his runny little nose. “Cousin?” I said, holding out my hand to take hers. “Do I merit being a relative?” “Oh,” she said, with a bright smile, “we have so many cousins. It would be sad if you were the worst among them.” As she was leaving, she told Sophie, the next oldest, a girl of about eleven, to take good care of the children and best greetings to her father on his return from his ride. She asked the children to obey their sister, Sophie, just as they would obey her, and a few said they would, but one bright little blond girl of about six declared that it would not be like obeying her and “we should rather have you.” The two oldest boys had climbed up on the box, and when I interceded, were given permission to drive with us as far as the forest if they promised not to tease one another and held on tight.
We had just settled down, and the women had finished greeting each other and exchanging the correct remarks about the others’ clothes and hats and given the people they were going to meet a thorough going-over, when Lotte asked the coachman to stop and let the boys off. They insisted on kissing her hand again, the older boy with a tenderness that seems to come naturally to boys of fifteen; the younger was much more impetuous and carefree about it. She sent her love to the little ones again, and we drove on.
The cousin asked whether Lotte had read the book she had sent her recently. “No,” Lotte said, “I don’t like it. You may have it back. I didn’t like the one you sent me before that, either.” When I asked her what the books were, and she told me, I was astonished.* Altogether, I found that everything she said displayed a resolute character, and with every word she spoke I could see some new attraction in her and a fresh radiance in her face, which soon seemed free of all constraint, because she saw that I understood her.
“When I was younger,” she said, “all I liked to read was novels. I can’t tell you how happy it used to make me when I could curl up in a corner on a Sunday and participate heart and soul in the joys and sorrows of some Miss Jenny2 or other. I must say that I still like to read that sort of thing, but since I seldom have the opportunity to read, it must be something I can really enjoy. And I like those writers best who help me find my world again, where the sort of things happen that happen all around me, and the story is as interesting and sympathetic as my own life at home, which may not be paradise but is, on the whole, a source of quite inexplicable joy to me.”
I did my best to hide the emotions her words aroused in me. I didn’t succeed very well because, when I heard her speak casually and very candidly about The Vicar of Wakefield and about——* I was quite beside myself and told her all I knew of them, and only after quite some time had passed, and Lotte turned suddenly to address the others, did I notice that they had been sitting there goggle-eyed, as if they weren’t sitting there at all! The cousin looked down her nose at me several times, but I didn’t care.
The conversation turned to the joy of dancing. “If a passion for dancing is sinful,” Lotte said, “then I cheerfully admit to it. I don’t know anything I would rather do than dance. When something is troubling me and I can sit down at my poor old piano—it needs tuning badly—and play a contredanse, everything is all right again.”
I could not take my eyes off her dark eyes as she chattered; I could not look away from her animated mouth, her bonny cheeks; I was lost utterly in the infectious good spirits of everything she had to say, sometimes without even hearing the words with which she expressed it! That will give you some idea, since, after all, you know me well. In short, when we stopped in front of the pavilion I got out of the carriage like a dreamer, so lost in the twilit world around me that I scarcely noticed the music floating down to us from the illuminated ballroom.
The cousin and Lotte’s partners, two gentlemen called Andran and N.N.—who can remember names?—met us at the entrance, appropriated their young ladies, and I led mine up the staircase.
One minuet followed another, and I asked one young lady after another to dance with me and it was always the most unattractive ones, of course, who would not end the figure. Lotte and her partner opened a quadrille, and you can imagine how delighted I was when the time came for them to start a figure with us. You should see her dance! She is so completely absorbed by motion, she dances with her whole heart, body, and soul. The result is harmony, so carefree and natural, as if there were nothing to life but dancing, as if she never gave anything else a thought—and I am sure that in such moments everything else is gone from her mind.
I asked her for the second contredanse. She replied that she could give me the third and with
