The Marquise of O and Other Stories (16 page)

When neither the Prince nor the Grand Chancellor replied to this speech by Hinz the Cupbearer, but merely glanced at him, and the discussion thus seemed to be over, the Elector said that he would consider the various opinions
put to them until the next meeting of the council. Although all was ready for the military campaign against Kohlhaas, it appeared that the preliminary step recommended by the Prince had greatly weakened the Elector's inclination to embark on it, for he was a man who felt the ties of friendship strongly. At any rate he asked the Grand Chancellor Count Wrede, whose view had seemed to him to be the most sensible one, to stay behind; and when Wrede showed him reports which indicated that the horse-dealer's strength had increased to four hundred men, indeed that owing to general dissatisfaction throughout the country caused by the Chamberlain's improper behaviour this number could be expected to double or treble in the near future, the Elector decided without further ado to accept Dr Luther's advice. He accordingly put Count Wrede in sole charge of the Kohlhaas affair, and only a few days later a proclamation appeared to the following effect:

No sooner had Kohlhaas received from Dr Luther a copy of this proclamation, which was displayed everywhere in the principality, than notwithstanding the conditional character of its undertakings he disbanded his men, sending
them away with gifts, expressions of his gratitude and suitable admonitions. He surrendered all the money, arms and equipment he had taken as booty to the courts at Lützen as Electoral property; and when he had sent Waldmann to Kohlhaasenbrück with letters for the magistrate proposing the re-purchase of his farm if that was possible, and Sternbald to Schwerin to fetch his children whom he wanted to have with him again, he left the castle at Lützen and, taking what was left of his small fortune with him in the form of negotiable documents, made his way unrecognized to Dresden.

Day was just breaking and the whole city was still asleep when he knocked on the door of his small property in the suburb of Pirna which, thanks to the honesty of the magistrate, had remained in his possession. He told Thomas, the aged caretaker who opened the door to him in surprise and consternation, to inform the Prince of Meissen at the government headquarters that he, Kohlhaas the horse-dealer, had arrived. The Prince, on receiving this message, thought it advisable to see its sender at once and find out personally how matters stood between them. When he presently appeared with a retinue of knights and men he found an immense crowd already assembled in the streets leading to Kohlhaas's house. The news of the arrival of the avenging angel who was pursuing the oppressors of the people with fire and sword had roused the whole of Dresden, city and suburbs, from its slumbers; the front door had to be bolted to keep back the surging mob of curious onlookers, and boys climbed up to the windows to catch a glimpse of the incendiary having his breakfast inside. As soon as the Prince had succeeded in entering the house with the help of the guards who cleared a way for him, and had reached Kohlhaas's room, he asked the latter, who was standing only partly dressed by a table, whether he was Kohlhaas the horse-dealer; whereupon Kohlhaas, taking from his belt a wallet containing a number of documents relating to his
affairs and respectfully handing it over, answered that he was. He added that, having disbanded his troops, he had come to Dresden under the safe-conduct granted to him by the Elector, in order to present in court his case against Junker Wenzel von Tronka concerning the horses. After quickly looking him over from head to foot, the Prince glanced through the papers in the wallet, asked him to explain the meaning of a certificate he found among them by which the court at Lützen acknowledged a deposit made in favour of the Electoral treasury, and then, in order to find out what kind of a man he was, put all sorts of questions to him about his children, his means, and the way of life he intended to adopt in the future. Judging from his answers that there were no grounds for misgivings on any score, he handed back the documents and said that nothing stood in the way of his proposed legal proceedings and that in order to initiate them he should apply directly to the Grand Chancellor of the High Court, Count Wrede. ‘In the meantime,' said the Prince after a pause in which he went to the window and with a look of amazement surveyed the crowd gathered in front of the house, ‘for the first few days you will have to accept a bodyguard to protect you both at home and in the streets!' Kohlhaas, disconcerted by this, looked down and made no reply. The Prince, coming away from the window, said: ‘Very well, then, but if anything happens you will have only yourself to blame,' and turned towards the door to leave the house. Kohlhaas, having reconsidered the point, said to him: ‘My lord, do as you please! If you give me your word that you will withdraw the guard as soon as I request it, I have no objection to the arrangement!' The Prince replied that that went without saying, and after he had instructed three lansquenets, who were presented to him for guard duty, that the man in whose house they were staying was free and that they were only to follow him when he went out in order to give him protection, he took leave of the horse-dealer with a condescending gesture and departed.

Towards noon, accompanied by his three bodyguards and followed by an immense crowd which had been warned by the police not to molest him in any way, Kohlhaas went to see the Grand Chancellor of the High Court, Count Wrede. The Count received him cordially and kindly in his anteroom, talked with him for fully two hours and, when he had listened to the entire sequence of events from start to finish, referred him to a famous Dresden lawyer appointed by the Court, who would draw up the statement of claim and submit it immediately. Without further delay Kohlhaas went to his residence and had a claim set out in terms exactly similar to those of the one originally rejected, calling for punishment of the Junker according to law, restoration of the horses to their previous condition, and damages both for himself and for his groom Herse who had been killed at Mühlberg, the latter to be paid to Herse's aged mother. When this was done he returned, accompanied by the still gaping crowd, to his house, resolving not to leave it again except on necessary business.

Meanwhile the Junker had been released from arrest in Wittenberg, and after recovering from a dangerous inflammation of the foot he had been summoned in peremptory fashion to present himself before the High Court in Dresden and answer the charges brought against him by the horse-dealer Kohlhaas concerning unlawful confiscation and gross ill-treatment of a pair of black horses. His cousins, the brothers Hinz and Kunz von Tronka, received him with great bitterness and contempt, calling him a worthless wretch who had brought shame and disgrace upon the entire family; they told him that he would now undoubtedly lose his case, and that he must make immediate arrangements to fetch the blacks, which, to the derision of all the world, he would be condemned to re-fatten. The Junker, in a weak and trembling voice, answered that he was more to be pitied than any man alive. He swore he had known almost nothing about this whole damnable affair which had plunged him into misfortune, and that the warden and the
steward were to blame for it all, since quite without his knowledge and not even remotely on his instructions they had used the horses for harvesting and ruined them with excessive work, partly on their own fields. So saying, he sat down and implored his kinsmen not to wound and insult him and thus wilfully bring back the illness from which he had only just recovered. The next day the Chamberlain and the Cupbearer, who had property in the neighbourhood of the burnt-out Tronka Castle, wrote at their cousin Junker Wenzel's request, and since they had no choice but to do so, to their tenants and stewards there demanding information as to the whereabouts of the blacks, which had gone astray on that day of disaster and not been heard of since. Since, however, the castle had been totally destroyed and almost all its occupants slaughtered, nothing came to light except that a stable-boy, driven by blows from the flat of the incendiary's sword, had rescued them from the burning shed where they stood, but afterwards, on asking the raging monster where he was to take them and what he was to do with them, had got no answer but a kick. The Junker's gout-stricken old housekeeper, who had fled to Meissen, assured him in reply to his written inquiry that on the morning following that dreadful night the stable-boy had gone off with the horses towards the Brandenburg frontier; but all further investigations there proved fruitless, and the information must have been erroneous anyway, since the Junker had no stable-boy whose home was in Brandenburg or even on the Brandenburg road. Some men from Dresden who had been in Wilsdruf a few days after the fire at Tronka Castle reported that a groom had arrived there about that time leading two horses by the halter, which because they were in such a wretched condition and could go no further had been left in a cowshed with a shepherd who had said he would feed them back to health. For a number of reasons it seemed very likely that these were the blacks in question, but according to people
from Wilsdruf the shepherd there had sold them again, it was not known to whom; and a third rumour from an unidentified source even asserted that the horses had already departed this life and were buried in the Wilsdruf carrion-pit. As may well be imagined, this turn of events was most welcome to the lords Hinz and Kunz, since it spared them the obligation to fatten the blacks in their stables for their cousin the Junker, who now had no stables of his own; for the sake of complete certainty, however, they sought verification of the report. Junker Wenzel von Tronka therefore, as liege lord of the demesne and lord justice, wrote formally to the court at Wilsdruf describing in detail the pair of horses which, he said, had been entrusted to his care but accidentally lost, and asking them to be so kind as to ascertain their present whereabouts and request and require the owner, whoever he might be, to deliver them to the stables of the Lord Kunz in Dresden, against generous reimbursement of all costs incurred. And accordingly, a few days later, the man who had purchased them from the shepherd in Wilsdruf actually appeared and led the skinny stumbling animals, tethered to his cart, into the city market-place; unluckily, however, for Junker Wenzel, and still more for honest Kohlhaas, this man turned out to be the knacker from Döbbeln.

Junker Wenzel was with his cousin the Chamberlain when the vague rumour reached him that a man had arrived in the city with two black horses which had survived the fire at Tronka Castle; at once, quickly rounding up a few servants from the house, they both went down to the palace square where the man was, intending, if these turned out to be Kohlhaas's animals, to pay his costs and take them from him and bring them home. But to their consternation the two gentlemen found that already, attracted by the spectacle, a crowd which increased from moment to moment had gathered round the two-wheeled cart to which the animals were fastened; and the people, amid uproarious
laughter, were shouting to each other that here were the horses on whose account the state had been rocked to its very foundations – a pair of horses already in the hands of the knacker! The Junker, having walked all round the cart and stared at the wretched creatures, which seemed on the point of dropping down dead at any minute, said in embarrassment that they were not the horses he had taken from Kohlhaas. But Kunz the Chamberlain, after turning upon him a look of such speechless fury that if it had been made of iron it would have knocked him to pieces, flung open his cloak to reveal his orders and chain of office, and going up to the knacker asked him whether these were the blacks taken over by the shepherd at Wilsdruf, and sent for through the Wilsdruf courts by their owner Junker Wenzel von Tronka. The knacker, who was busy giving a fat, well-fed nag a bucket of water to drink, said, ‘The blacks?' Putting the bucket down, he took the horse's bit from its mouth and added: ‘The blacks tied to my cart were sold to me by the swineherd from Hainichen. Where he got them from and whether they came from the shepherd at Wilsdruf, I don't know.' He had been ordered, he said, picking up the bucket again and propping it between his knee and the shaft of the cart, by an officer of the Wilsdruf court to bring them to Dresden to the house of the Tronka family, but the Junker he was to see about it was called Kunz. With these words he turned round, took the pail with the water the horse had left in it and emptied it on to the cobblestones. The Chamberlain, surrounded by the stares of the mocking crowd and unable to engage the attention of the fellow, who busily and imperturbably went on with his work, said that he was the Chamberlain Kunz von Tronka, but that the blacks of which he was to take possession must be those belonging to the Junker his cousin. A groom who had managed to escape from the fire at Tronka Castle had given them to the shepherd at Wilsdruf and originally they had belonged to the horse-dealer, Kohlhaas. He asked the man,
who was standing there with his legs apart and hitching up his breeches, if he knew nothing about this, and if he knew whether the swineherd from Hainichen had – for this was the vital point – perhaps acquired them from the Wilsdruf shepherd, or from a third person who, in his turn, had bought them from the shepherd. The knacker, after standing by his cart and passing water, said that he had been sent to Dresden with these blacks and was to get his money for them from the Tronka family. He did not understand what the gentleman was talking about, and whether the swineherd at Hainichen had got them from the shepherd at Wilsdruf or from Peter or Paul was all one to him, since they hadn't been stolen. And with that, putting his whip across his broad back, he strolled over to a tavern in the square to get himself some breakfast, since he was hungry. The Chamberlain, who had no idea what on God's earth to do with a pair of horses sold by the swineherd at Hainichen to the knacker at Döbbeln, unless they were indeed those same horses that the devil was riding through Saxony, asked the Junker for his views. But when the latter, with pale and quivering lips, replied that the most sensible course would be to buy the blacks whether they belonged to Kohlhaas or not, the Chamberlain, cursing the father and mother who had brought him into this world, flung his cloak round him again and walked away from the crowd, totally at a loss. Seeing Baron von Wenk, a friend of his, riding across the street, and calling him over, he asked him to stop at the house of the Grand Chancellor Count Wrede and with his assistance get Kohlhaas to come and examine the blacks; for he was determined not to leave the square just because the rabble were staring so mockingly at him and, with handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths, only seemed to be waiting for him to go before bursting into laughter. It happened that Kohlhaas, summoned by a court messenger to give certain explanations that were needed concerning the property deposited at Lützen, was in the Chancellor's room when the
Baron entered with his message. The Chancellor rose from his seat with an air of annoyance and left the horse-dealer, whom the Baron did not know, standing on one side with the papers in his hand; the Baron then told him of the embarrassing situation in which Kunz and Wenzel von Tronka found themselves. The knacker from Döbbeln, acting on inadequate instructions from the Wilsdruf courts, had turned up with a pair of horses in such a miserable condition that Junker Wenzel understandably hesitated to identify them as those belonging to Kohlhaas; for this reason, if they were to be taken from the knacker for the purpose of attempting to re-fatten them in the family's stables, ocular inspection by Kohlhaas would first be necessary to remove all doubt on the point. ‘Would you therefore be kind enough,' he concluded, ‘to have the horse-dealer fetched from his house and taken to the market-place where the horses are.' Removing his spectacles from his nose, the Grand Chancellor told the Baron that he was under two misapprehensions: firstly, if he though that the point in question could be settled only by ocular inspection on the part of Kohlhaas; and secondly, if he imagined that he, the Chancellor, was authorized to have Kohlhaas taken by a guard wherever the Junker wanted. He then introduced him to the horse-dealer who was standing behind him, and requested him, as he sat down and put on his spectacles again, to consult the horse-dealer himself in this matter. Kohlhaas, whose expression revealed nothing of what was passing through his mind, said that he was prepared to follow the Baron to the market-place and inspect the horses brought to the city by the knacker. As the Baron turned round in amazement towards him, he returned to the Grand Chancellor's desk and having given him, from the documents in his wallet, several pieces of information concerning the property deposited in Lützen, he took his leave. The Baron, who had blushed scarlet and crossed to the window, did likewise; whereupon, escorted by the three lansquenets acting on the Prince of Meissen's
orders, and accompanied by a crowd of people, they walked to the palace square. Meanwhile Kunz the Chamberlain, defying the advice of several friends who had now joined him, was standing his ground among the people before the knacker from Döbbeln. As soon as the Baron appeared with the horse-dealer, he went up to the latter and asked him, holding his sword with pride and dignity under his arm, whether the horses standing behind the cart were his. Raising his hat respectfully to the gentleman who had asked him this question and whom he did not know, the horse-dealer, without replying, went across to the knacker's cart accompanied by all the noblemen present. He stopped at a distance of twelve paces from the animals, which were standing unsteadily with their heads bowed to the ground and not touching the hay put down for them by the knacker, glanced at them briefly, then turned back to the Chamberlain and said: ‘My lord, the knacker is quite right; the horses tied to his cart belong to me.' With that he looked round at all the gentlemen, raised his hat again and, escorted by his bodyguard, left the square. As soon as the Chamberlain heard this he strode across to the knacker so quickly that the plume of his helmet shook, threw him a bag of money, and while the fellow, combing his hair back from his forehead with a lead comb, held the bag in his hand and stared at the money, he ordered a groom to untether the horses and lead them home. The groom, at his master's command, left a group of his friends and relatives who were in the crowd, and did in fact approach the horses, rather red in the face and stepping over a great pile of dung that had formed at their feet. But hardly had he taken hold of their halters to untether them when his cousin, Master Himboldt, seized his arm and shouting: ‘Don't you touch those knacker's nags!' hurled him away from the cart. Then rather uncertainly stepping back across the pile of dung towards the Chamberlain, who had stood speechless at this incident, he told him he had better get himself a knacker's man if
he wanted an order like that carried out. Foaming with rage, the Chamberlain glared for a moment at Himboldt, then turned round and shouted over the heads of the noblemen surrounding him, calling for the guards; and as soon as an officer with some Electoral guardsmen appeared from the palace at Baron von Wenk's behest, he gave him a brief account of the outrageous riot which the citizens of the town were presuming to instigate, and called on him to arrest the leader of the mob, Master Himboldt, whom he seized by the shirt, accusing him of having assaulted and thrust aside his groom who had been untying the blacks from the cart on his orders. Skilfully twisting himself free and pushing the Chamberlain back, Himboldt said: ‘My lord! Telling a lad of twenty what he should and should not do is not inciting him to riot! Ask him if he's prepared to go against all custom and decency and touch the horses tied to that cart; if he'll do it after what I said, then let him! For all I care he can flay and skin them here and now!' At this the Chamberlain rounded on his groom and asked him if he took exception to carrying out his order to untether Kohlhaas's horses and take them home. When the young man, retreating into the crowd, diffidently answered that the horses would have to be made decent again before that could be expected of him, the Chamberlain pursued him, snatched off his hat which bore the family's coat of arms, stamped on it, drew his sword, and raining furious blows on him with the flat of the blade, instantly drove the groom out of the square and out of his service. Master Himboldt cried out: ‘Down with the murderous tyrant!' and as the people, incensed by this scene, pressed together and forced the guard back, he threw the Chamberlain to the ground from behind, tore off his cloak and collar and helmet, wrenched his sword out of his hand and with a savage sweep of the arm hurled it away across the square. In vain Junker Wenzel cried out to the other noblemen to help his cousin, as he himself escaped from the riot; they had
barely taken a step before the surging populace scattered them, and the Chamberlain, who had injured his head in falling, was abandoned to the full fury of the mob. His life was saved only by the appearance of a troop of cavalrymen who happened to be crossing the square and whom the officer commanding the Electoral guardsmen called to his assistance. When he had driven off the crowd, the officer arrested the raging Himboldt, and while he was being taken off to prison by some cavalrymen, two friends lifted the luckless, blood-bespattered Chamberlain from the ground and took him home. Such was the catastrophic outcome of this well-meant and honest attempt to give satisfaction to the horse-dealer in return for the wrongs that had been done to him. The knacker from Döbbeln, his business concluded, had no wish to delay any longer, and as the onlookers began to disperse he tied the horses to a lamp-post where they stood the whole day without anyone bothering about them, the laughing-stock of street-urchins and loiterers. Consequently, since they were deprived of all care and attention, the police had to take responsibility for them and instructed the Dresden knacker to keep them in his yard outside the city until further notice.