Gustav Schlling
Memoirs of a Baron
BOOK ONE
1. THE READER GETS TO KNOW ME
I owe my life to a passionate embrace with which the Old Baron honored my mother.
The Old Baron was one of the richest noblemen in the country, and the last member of his branch. It did not matter to him that he could barely count the number of his forebears; despite the fact that he was the last one, he had no desire to get himself married and increase the length of his long line of nobility. Once in a while he would pick out a young girl from among his subjects whose charms attracted him as the loveliest he had ever seen at that particular time. He would have her properly trained by a governess and dress her up in fineries with the help of a tailor and a seamstress of impeccable taste. Thereupon he would love the girl for as long as it took him to find another one he liked more.
But he never expelled the sweethearts he had grown weary of without any further ado. He handed every one of them a dowry in direct proportion to the measure of delight which he had found with her. Many a surgeon, schoolmaster or tax collector in the area was rather well-to-do, only because he had married one of the Old Baron's little wards. (This is how he himself referred to his dethroned amours.)
To be sure, the old parish priest sulked occasionally about such misconduct, and he never wanted to hear the confession of one of those transformed peasant beauties, or admit her to the baptismal font to be a godmother; however, the pastor was much more sensible in these matters and wangled it so that somehow the blame was heaped upon the conscience of his most gracious patron. And the Baron considered the poor parish priest much too old to be punished for his stubborn orthodoxy.
And it came to pass that the Old Baron visited a certain town and beheld the daughter of a barber and saw that she was beautiful. He immediately dispatched his chamberlain, and that Mercury never returned from such a mission without having accomplished his purpose. He did not fail that time either. If that fellow had been at the court of a sovereign prince, his skillful and cunning manners would have swung him upwards all the way to prime minister.
The shy barber's daughter visited the Old Baron when dusk began to fall and returned home several hours later, well laden with many presents.
When ten weeks had gone by, the Baron received a letter from the poor girl in which she described, to the best of her ability, her fear of the severity of her hot-tempered father, especially now that she was afraid he was about to discover a slight change in her condition.
The Baron sent for the old man and sugared the pill with gilding. The man fumed and raged, then quieted down quickly when the Baron promised a two thousand Taler dowry for his daughter plus upbringing and education of the child.