In Paradise A Novel. Vol. I.

Excerpt

CHAPTER I.

It was a Sunday in the midsummer of 1869.

The air, cleared by a thunderstorm the night before, was still tremulous with that soft, invigorating warmth which, farther south, makes breathing such an easy matter, but which, north of the Alps, seldom outlasts the early morning. And yet the bells, that sounded from the Munich Frauenkirche far across the Theresienwiese, and the field where stands the great statue of Bavaria, were already ringing for high mass. Here, outside the city, there seemed to be no human ear to listen. The great bronze maiden stood there in the deepest solitude, holding her wreath above her head, and with a mazed and dreamy look, as though she might be thinking whether this were not an opportune moment to step down from her granite pedestal, and to wander at will through the town, that to-day raised its towers and roofs like a city of the dead above the bare green plain. Now and then a bird flew out of the little grove behind the Ruhmes-halle, and fluttered about the shoulders of the giant maiden, or rested for a moment on the mane of the lion that sat lazily listening, pressed close to the knee of his great mistress. But away in the city the bells rang on. The air grew drowsy with the steadily increasing heat, with the hum and the vibration of the distant ringing, and the strong fragrance that rose from the meadow, which had been mown the day before. At last the bells ceased; and now not a sound was to be heard, save that there came from a house in one of the outer streets the sound of a flute, played by fits and starts, as though the player stopped for breath between the passages, or as though he forgot his notes in other thoughts.

The window, from which this singular music sounded into the summer air, opened from the upper story of a house that stood some distance back from the street--a house of a kind of which there are many in this western suburb. They are generally entirely unornamented, boxlike buildings, windowless except on the northern side, and there pierced by great quadrangular openings, supplied with all manner of arrangements for admitting the steadiest possible light from above. In summer one never sees above them the little cloud of smoke that betrays a domestic hearth, and no profane smell of cooking meets the visitor upon the threshold--as in most other Munich houses. From the open windows floats only a light, invisible odor of tobacco-smoke, agreeably mingled with the invigorating fragrance of varnishes, oils, and turpentine--which shows that here only the holy fire of art is fed, and that here, upon silent altars (three-legged easels and sculptors' pedestals) are offered sacrifices that cannot even shelter the priests that offer them from the pangs of hunger.

The house of which we speak turned its windowless southern side toward a little yard, in which lay scattered marble and sandstone blocks of different sizes. The four studio-windows of the northern side looked into a carefully-tended, narrow garden, that sheltered them from all disagreeable reflected lights....