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Updated: May 13, 2025
In vain Lehfeldt pleaded, in vain many friends argued. Franz remained respectfully firm in his refusal. This, as I said, interested Bourgonef immensely. He seemed to enter completely into the minds of the sorrowing, pleading parents, and the sorrowing, denying lover. He appreciated and expounded their motives with a subtlety and delicacy of perception which surprised and delighted me.
Our host, Zum Bayerischen Hof, one day announced with great satisfaction that he had himself heard from the syndic that the police were on the traces of the assassin. "I am sorry to hear it," said Bourgonef. The guests paused from eating, and looked at him with astonishment. "It is a proof," he added, "that even the police now give it up as hopeless.
I fell ill, and for seven weeks lay utterly prostrate. On recovering, this note was handed to me. It was from Agalma." Bourgonef here held out to me a crumpled letter, and motioned that I should open it and read. It ran thus: "I have thought much of what you have so often said, that it would be for the happiness of both if our unfortunate engagement were set aside.
Sebald's Church, a young Frenchman, who was criticising its architecture with fluent dogmatism, drew Bourgonef into the discussion, and thereby elicited such a display of accurate and extensive knowledge, no less than delicacy of appreciation, that we were all listening spellbound.
The sculptor received us with great cordiality, and in the pleasure of the subsequent hour I got over to some extent the irritation Bourgonef's talk had excited. The next day I left Munich for the Tyrol. My parting with Bourgonef was many degrees less friendly than it would have been a week before.
My heart throbbed so violently that it seemed to me as if its tumult must be heard by others. Yet my face must have been tolerably calm, since Bourgonef made no comment on it. I answered his remarks in vague fragments, for, in truth, my thoughts were flying from conjecture to conjecture. I remembered that the stranger had a florid complexion; was this rouge?
Now, although Bourgonef, who was not a phrenologist, might be convinced of the absence of ferocious instincts in Ivan, to me, as a phrenologist, the statement was eminently incredible. All the appearances of his manner were such as to confirm his master's opinion. He was quiet, even tender in his attentions.
At this moment Sophie entered bringing wine, and I saw Bourgonef slowly turn his eyes upon her with a look which then was mysterious to me, but which now spoke too plainly its dreadful meaning. What is there in a look, you will say? Perhaps nothing; or it may be everything.
From this time the conversation continued between Bourgonef and myself; and he not only succeeded in entirely dissipating my absurd antipathy which I now saw to have been founded on purely imaginary grounds, for neither the falseness nor the furtiveness could now be detected but he succeeded in captivating all my sympathy.
It was truly and simply the suggestion of my vagrant fancy, which had mysteriously settled itself into a conviction; and having thus capriciously identified the stranger with Lieschen's murderer, I now, upon evidence quite as preposterous, identified Bourgonef with the stranger. The folly became apparent even to myself.
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