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Updated: May 13, 2025
Hedvig has filled my window with visions of a well-ordered German home, of sausages and Sauerkraut, of beer and pickled fruit, of embroideries and coffee-parties. Here comes a hatless representative of young Russia. His clothes are shabby and neglected; he walks with a shuffling, tired movement. But his face is startling. It seems to light up the path with some kind of spiritual fervour.
But for playwrights who are tempted to seek for effects of pathos by similar means, one may without hesitation lay down this maxim: Be sure you are an Ibsen before you kill your Hedvig.
The night seemed short, though we had not lost a moment's time, and at daybreak we had to part. I left them in bed and I was fortunate enough to get away without being observed. I slept till noon, and then having made my toilette I went to call on the pastor, to whom I praised Hedvig to the skies. This was the best way to get him to come to supper at Balances the next day.
For example, I might possibly have been able to seduce Hedvig without Helen, but I am certain I should never have succeeded with Helen if she had not seen her cousin take liberties with me which she no doubt thought contrary to the feelings of modesty which a respectable young woman ought to have.
They proceeded to sit down and I began to take off their shoes, praising the beauty of their legs, and pretending for the present not to want to go farther than the knee. When they got into the water they were obliged to pick up their clothes, and I encouraged them to do so. "Well, well," said Hedvig, "men have thighs too."
We went out arm in arm, and in a few minutes we were out of sight of everyone. "Do you know," said I to Hedvig, "that you have made a conquest of M. Tronchin?" "Have I? The worthy banker asked me some very silly questions." "You must not expect everyone to be able to contend with you." "I can't help telling you that your question pleased me best of all.
At last, when I had drawn on their shoes and stockings, I told them that I was delighted to have seen the hidden charms of the two prettiest girls in Geneva. "What effect had it on you?" asked Hedvig. "I daren't tell you to look, but feel, both of you." "Do you bathe, too." "It's out of the question, a man's undressing takes so much trouble."
M. d'Harcourt was urged to ask her some questions, but he replied in the words of Horace, 'Nulla mihi religio est'. Then Hedvig turned to me and asked me to put her some hard question, "something difficult, which you don't know yourself." "I shall be delighted. Do you grant that a god possesses in a supreme degree the qualities of man?" "Yes, excepting man's weaknesses."
Hedvig philosophised over pleasure, and told me she would never have known it if I had not chanced to meet her uncle. Helen did not speak; she was more voluptuous than her cousin, and swelled out like a dove, and came to life only to expire a moment afterwards. I wondered at her astonishing fecundity; while I was engaged in one operation she passed from death to life fourteen times.
But my niece, gentlemen, reads and reflects over what she has read, perhaps with rather too much freedom, but I love her all the same, because she always ends by acknowledging that she knows nothing." A lady who had not opened her lips hitherto asked Hedvig for a definition of spirit.
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