Johann Christopher (Full Two Volumes)

Author: (French) Rolland, R. (Author), Fu Lei (Translator)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-07-01
Features: They no longer spoke. John Mischel sat by the fireplace, Luiza sat on the bed, both lost in thought. The old man said so with his mouth, but his heart was still filled with regret over his son's marriage. Luiza was also thinking about it, blaming herself, though she had nothing to blame herself for. She used to be a maid, marrying John Mischel's son, Manchow Clauth, which everyone found strange, and she herself could hardly believe it. The Clauth family had no great wealth, but in the small town in the Rhine Valley where the old man had lived for over fifty years, they were highly respected. They were musicians passed down from father to son, known to all musicians from Cologne to Mannheim. Manchow played the violin in the court theater; John Mischel had once been the conductor of the Grand Duke's orchestra. The old man was deeply hurt by Manchow's marriage; he had once held great hopes for his son, wanting him to become a celebrity that he himself had failed to achieve. But the son acted foolishly for a moment, destroying his father's ambitions. At first, he raged and cursed Manchow and Luiza. But inwardly, he was a good man, so after realizing her character, he forgave her and even showed her some paternal tenderness, though this tenderness was often expressed through murmurs. No one understood how Manchow could marry into such a family—even Manchow himself was baffled. Of course, it wasn't because Luiza was beautiful. She had no charming qualities: short, pale, frail, and in stark contrast to Manchow and John Mischel, who were both tall, red-faced giants, strong, hearty, and fond of loud laughter and shouts. She seemed overshadowed by them; people paid little attention to her, and she tried to hide even more. If Manchow had been a kind-hearted person, one might say he valued Luiza's simplicity more than any other virtue. However, he was excessively vain. Men like him were quite handsome, knew they were handsome, and enjoyed showing off. They were not without talent and could have married into a wealthy family, even—who knows?—seduced a few female students in the middle-class families where they taught. Instead, he suddenly chose a woman from a poor, unattractive, uneducated family, as if he had married her out of spite! But there are some people in the world who always do the unexpected, even things beyond their own expectations—Manchow was one such person. They might have had foresight: as the saying goes, one with foresight is worth two—they believed themselves to be immune to deception, steering the ship with great steadiness toward a certain goal. But their calculations excluded themselves, because they fundamentally did not know themselves. Their minds often became empty, and at such times, they would abandon the helm; once the reins were loosened, they would play tricks and cause trouble for their masters. An uncontrolled ship would crash straight into the rocks, and the clever Manchow ended up marrying a cook. On the day he decided to marry her, he was neither drunk nor mad, nor was he filled with passion: far from it. But perhaps, besides the mind, heart, and senses, there are other mysterious forces that take over when the others sleep, ruling us; that night, when Manchow met Luiza by the river, sitting beside her in the reeds, and foolishly proposed to her, he might have encountered those mysterious forces in her timid, pale eyes. P10-11