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PETER H. RAVEN LIBRARY

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THE STORY OF SEVENOAKS.

83

liberty to procure the signature of the pat-
entee.”

“ I did not. I refused to do so on the
ground that he was not of sound mind —
that he was not a responsible person.”

“ When was this ? ”

I have no record of the date, but it was
after the 12th of May, i860 — the date of Mr.
Benedict’s admission to the asylum.”

“ That is all,” said Mr. Balfour.

Mr. Cavendish tried to cross-examine, but
without any result, except to emphasize the
direct testimony, though he tried persistently
to make the witness remember that, while
Mr. Belcher might have shown him the as-
signment, and that he read it for the pur-
pose which he had stated, it was another
paper to which he had wished to secure the
patient’s signature.

Samuel Yates was next called.

“You are a member of our profession, I
believe,” said Mr. Balfour.

“ I am, sir.”

“ Have yoh ever been in the service of
the defendant in this case ? ”

“ Yes, sir.”

“ What have you done for him ? ”

“ I worked many months in the endeavor
to ascertain whether Paul Benedict was liv-
ing or dead.”

“ It isn’t essential that we should go into
that; and as the defendant has testified that
he procured the autograph letters which are
in the possession of the Court from you, I
presume you will corroborate his testimony.”

“ He did procure them of me, sir.”

“ Did he inform you of the purpose to
which he wished to put them ? ”

“ He did, sir. He said that he wished to
verify some signatures.”

“Were you ever employed in his library
at Sevenoaks, by his agent ? ”

“Yes, sir, I wrote there during several
weeks.”

“ May it please the Court, I have a letter
in my hand, the genuineness of whose sig-
nature has been recognized by the defend-
ant, written by Robert Belcher to Paul Bene-
dict, which, as it has a direct bearing upon
the case, I beg the privilege of placing in
evidence. It was written the next day after
the date of the alleged assignment, and came
inclosed from Benedict’s hands to mine.”

Mr. Belcher evidently recalled the letter,
for he sat limp in the chair, like a man
stunned. A fierce quarrel then arose be-
tween the counsel concerning the admission
of the letter. The Judge examined it, and
said that he could see no reason why it

should not be admitted. Then Mr. Balfour
read the following note :

“ Sevenoaks, May 5, i860.

“ Dear Benedict : I am glad to know that you
are better. Since you distrust my pledge that I
will give you a reasonable share of the profits on
the use of your patents, I will go to your house this
afternoon, with witnesses, and have an independent
paper prepared, to be signed by myself, after the
assignment is executed, which will give you a defi-
nite claim upon me for royalty. We will be there
at four o’clock.

“Yours, Robert Belcher.”

“ Mr. Yates,” said Mr. Balfour, “ have you
ever seen this letter before ? ”

Yates took the letter, looked it over, and
then said :

“ I have, sir. I found the letter in a
drawer of the library-table, in Mr. Belcher’s
house at Sevenoaks. I delivered it un-
opened to the man to whom it was address-
ed, leaving him to decide the question as to
whether it belonged to him or the writer. I
had no idea of its contents at the time, but
became acquainted with them afterward, for
I was present at the opening of the letter.”

“ That is all,” said Mr. Balfour.

“ So you stole this letter, did you ? ” in-
quired Mr. Cavendish.

“ I found it while in Mr. Belcher’s service,
and took it personally to the man to whom
it was addressed, as he apparently had the
best right to it. I am quite willing to re-
turn it to the writer, if it is decided that it
belongs to him. I had no selfish end to
serve in the affair.”

Here the Judge interposed.

“ The Court,” said he, “ finds this letter
in the hands of the plaintiff, delivered by a
man who at the time was in the employ of
the defendant, and had the contents of the
room in his keeping. The paper has a di-
rect bearing on the case, and the Court will
not go back of the facts stated.”

Mr. Cavendish sat down and consulted
his client. Mr. Belcher was afraid of Yates.
The witness not only knew too much con-
cerning his original intentions, but he was a
lawyer who, if questioned too closely and
saucily, would certainly manage to bring in
facts to his disadvantage. Yates had al-
ready damaged him sadly, and Mr. Belcher
felt that it would not do to provoke a re-
direct examination. So, after a whispered
colloquy with his counsel, the latter told the
witness that he was done with him. Then
Mr. Belcher and his counsel conversed again
for some time, when Mr. Balfour rose and
said, addressing the Court :

“ The defendant and his client evidently

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THE STORY OF SEVENOAKS.

need time for consultation, and, as there is
a little preliminary work to be done before
I present another witness, I suggest that the
Court take a recess of an hour. In the mean-
time, I wish to secure photographic copies of
the signatures of the two autograph letters,
and of the four signatures of the assignment.

I ask the Court to place these documents in
the keeping of an officer, to be used for this
purpose, in an adjoining room, where I have
caused a photographic apparatus to be placed,
and where a skillful operator is now in wait-
ing. I ask this privilege, as it is essential
to a perfect demonstration of the character
of the document on which the decision of
this case must turn.”

The Judge acceded to Mr. Balfour’s re-
quest, both in regard to the recess and the
use of the paper; and the assembly broke up
into little knots of earnest talkers, most of
whom manifested no desire to leave the
building.

Mr. Cavendish approached Mr. Balfour,
and asked for a private interview. When
they had retired to a lobby, he said :

“ You are not to take any advantage of
this conversation. I wish to talk in con-
fidence.”

“ Very well,” said Mr. Balfour.

My client,” said Cavendish, is in a
devilish bad box. His principal witness has
run away, his old friends all turn against
him, and circumstantial evidence doesn’t
befriend him. I have advised him to stop
this suit right here, and make a compromise.
No one wants to kill the General. He’s a
sharp man, but he is good-natured, and a
useful citizen. He can handle these patents
better than Benedict can, and make money
enough for both of them. What could
Benedict do if he had the patents in his
hands ? He’s a simpleton. He’s a nobody.
Any man capable of carrying on his busi-
ness would cheat him out of his eye-teeth.”

‘‘ I am carrying on his business, myself,
just at this time,” remarked Mr. Balfour,
seriously.

‘‘That’s all right, of course; but you
know that you and I can settle this busi-
ness better for these men than they can set-
tle it for themselves.”

“ I’ll be frank with you,” said Mr. Balfour.
“ I am not one who regards Robert Belcher
as a good-natured man and a useful citizen,
and I, for one — to use your own phrase —
want to kill him. He has preyed upon the
public for ten years, and I owe a duty not
only to my client but to society. I under-
stand how good a bargain I could make

with him at this point, but I will make no
bargain with him. He is an unmitigated
scoundrel, and he will only go out of this
court to be arrested for crime; and I do
not expect to drop him until I drop him
into a penitentiary, where he can reflect
upon his forgeries at leisure.”

“ Then you refuse any sort of a compro-

“ My dear sir,” said Mr. Balfour, warmly,
“ do you suppose I can give a man a right
to talk of terms who is in my hands ? Do
you suppose I can compromise with crime ?
You know I can’t.”

“ Very well — ^let it go. I suppose I must
go through with it. You understand that
this conversation is confidential.”

“I do ; and you ? ”

“ Oh, certainly!”

CHAPTER XXVII.

IN WHICH A HEAVENLY WITNESS APPEARS

WHO CANNOT BE CROSS-EXAMINED, AND

BEFORE WHICH THE DEFENSE UTTERLY

BREAKS DOWN.

At the re-assembling of the Court, a large
crowd had come in. Those who had heard
the request of Mr. Balfour had reported
what was going on, and, as the promised
testimony seemed to involve some curious
features, the court-room presented the most
crowded appearance that it had worn since
the beginning of the trial.

Mr. Belcher had grown old during the
hour. His consciousness of guilt, his fear
of exposure, the threatened loss of his for-
tune, and the apprehension of a retribution
of disgrace were sapping his vital forces,
minute by minute. All the instruments that
he had tried to use for his own base pur-
poses were turned against himself. The
great world that had glittered around the
successful man was growing dark, and,
what was worse, there were none to pity
him. He had lived for himself; and now,
in his hour of trouble, no one was true to
him, no one loved him — ^not even his wife
and children 1

He gave a helpless, hopeless sigh, as Mr.
Balfour called to the witness stand Professor
Albert Timms.

Professor Timms was the man already
described among the three new witnesses, as
the one who seemed to be conscious of
bearing the world upon his shoulders, and
to find it so inconsiderable a burden. He
advanced to the stand with the air of one

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THE GOETHE HOUSE AT FRANKFORT. 117

of a Chinese pattern. Hardly had the old
Rath got them furnished to his mind when
the Seven Years’ War broke out; Frankfort
was occupied by the French, and the Count
Thorane from Provence was billeted upon
him. The Count, a well-bred and highly
cultivated nobleman, did everything in his
power to make his presence as little burden-
some as possible, and even refrained from
hanging up his maps on the Chinese wall-
paper. The friends of the family were
never wearied in dwelling on the Herr
Rath’s good fortune that so gentlemanly an
occupant had fallen to his lot. But the
Herr Rath would listen to no palliative sug-
gestions ; he was almost beside himself with
rage at seeing his best rooms, the apple of
his eye, seized upon by strangers and ene-
mies; and, added to this, he was so fierce
a partisan for “ Old Fritz,” that during the
whole time of the Count’s stay, which ex-
tended to about three years. Rath Goethe
went about with a thorn in his flesh, and on
one occasion gave vent to his long pent-up
wrath in such terms that only the urgent
intercessions of his wife and friends saved
him from immediate arrest. The mother
and children were at once on the best of
terms with the Count, who often sent the
children cake and ices firom his table ; but
the ices, to the children’s great distress, the
mother always threw out of the window, de-
claring, in her honest simplicity, that she
did not believe the human stomach could
digest ice, be it ever so much sweetened.
Goethe dwells at some length on this very
important period of his boyhood, and the
influences upon his own growth and devel-
opment which arose from Count Thorane’s
residence in his father’s house.

The rooms which the Count occupied
consist of one large central drawing-room
having four windows to the street, with
rooms opening out of it on each side ; that
on the left having two windows, and the
smaller one on the right but one. The
Count was subject to fits of dejection or
hypochondria, at which times he would re-
tire for days and see no one but his servant.
He filled the post of Lieutenant du Roi, a
sort of Judge- Advocate, whose business it
was to decide upon all cases of strife arising
between soldiers or between soldiers and
citizens ; but when his hypochondria seized
him, not the most urgent cases could draw
him from the little one-windowed nest to
the right of the drawing-room, which he had
chosen for his ‘^growlery.” The family
learned from the servant’s gossip that the

Count once, when this fit was on him, had
given what he afterward thought a very un-
righteous decision, and hence his determi-
nation to retire entirely at such seasons from
all participation in human affairs.

Passing up the stairs from the second to
the third floor, we notice the monograms
J. C. G., C. E. G., in the wrought-iron stair
railing. We cross the cheerful antechamber
and come to the apartments which the
family occupied. The division of the rooms
is slightly different from that on the floor
below, the central room being smaller, with
but three windows, the side rooms having
each two. The central room was the family
drawing-room ; here, as has been mentioned,
all the pictures were hung after the rebuild-
ing, hence it was usually called the pict-
ure-room.” Count Thorane, a great lover
of art, hearing the picture-room spoken of
on the night of his arrival, insisted upon
seeing it at once, and went over each pict-
ure with a candle in his hand. To the left
of the picture-room was the Herr Rath’s
library, study, and special sanctum. Be-
sides its two front windows it has a little
window in the side wall, giving a good view
up the street. A f^w lines in the Autobiog-
raphy explain its use. “ I slipped home,”
Goethe writes, “ by a roundabout way, for
on the side toward the kleiner Hirsch^a-
ben my father, not without the opposition
of his neighbor, had had a small guckfenster
(peep-hole) made in the wall ; this side we
avoided when we did not wish him to see
us coming home.” To the right of the pict-
ure-room was the Frau Rath’s sitting-room,
and behind and communicating with it,
looking toward the court, the parents’ bed-
room, — the room in which the poet was
bom, — and in the wing, still further in the
rear, the children’s bedroom.

On the fourth floor we come to the Man-
sard rooms, — the poet’s rooms, — which re-
quire a few words of preface. From the
time of its sale in 1795 by Goethe’s mother'
until the death of the poet in 1832, the
Goethe house seems to have been little
thought of. But the renewed interest in a
great man’s history which is always awak-
ened by his death, brought again into notice
the house in which Goethe was born.
The Roessing family, in whose possession it
was, were at first very much astonished at
the frequent applications to see the house.
The first one occurred in the year after
Goethe’s death, and, from that time, the
number of visitors increased day by day.
There is on the fourth floor a small attic

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THE GOETHE HOUSE AT FRANKEORT

room to which some obscure tradition was
attached as having been Goethe’s room.
The Roessings accepted this tradition with-
out investigation, and, thus, for thirty-five
years, it was the custom to conduct visitors
at once to this little attic and point it out to
them as Goethe’s chamber where he had
written his earlier works. Of course, it was
not long before it got the name of the
Werther-Zimmer, and Bettina von Arnim
unconsciously added to the apocryphal
character of her book (“ Goethe’s Corre-
spondence with a Child”), by having a
view of the Werther-Zimmer engraved as
a frontispiece to it. So striking a confir-
mation of the supposed fondness of the
Muses for garrets could not fail to be
noted, and many a sage visitor doubtless
dwelt upon the coincidence that the rich
man’s son must go to the garret to mount
his Pegasus. But the whole romance of
the Werther attic has been crumbled in the
dust by Dr. G. H. Otto Volger, who, with
true German patience and industry, has so
thoroughly investigated every point in con-
nection with the Goethe mansion. It is not
necessary to follow Dr. Volger into all the
details of his proof. The chief points are :
I St. That the so-called Werther room is
not in the gable, and has no rooms commu-
nicating with it. 2d. That it never has a ray
of morning sun. In regard to the first point,
Goethe constantly speaks of his room as a
gable room (Giebelzimmer), having other
rooms communicating with it. In regard
to the second point, the fact that Goethe’s
room had the morning sun is established by
the poet’s well-known account of his morn-
ing sacrifice to the Almighty, after the Old
Testament fashion, when the rays of the
morning sun, concentrated through a burn-
ing-glass, were made to light the pastilles on
the, boy’s extemporized altar. Dr. Volger
selects the long celebrated attic as the
place where the silk-worms were kept, and
where the engravings were bleached, as so
circumstantially described in the Autobiog-
raphy.

Passing by the Werther room, which is
directly to the right on reaching the top of
the staircase, and crossing the antecham-
ber, similar to those on the other floors, one
comes to the poet’s rooms. The central one
is a pleasant and spacious reception-room,
where the son of the house could receive
with dignity, and without apology, the friends
and the visitors of distinction whom the suc-
cess of “ Goetz ” and of “Werther ” attracted
to him from every quarter. It stands at pres-

ent bare and cheerless, but we can picture
to ourselves the simple furniture, the books,
the pictures, the casts from the antique —
heads of the Laocoon group, and of Niobe
and her children — and the minerals, and the
natural curiosities which bore witness to the
mental activity and versatility of its occu-
pant. The house directly opposite is the
only one in the Hirschgraben, except the
Goethe mansion, which remains unchanged,
so that, in looking from the poet’s window,
the outline and general effect of the opposite
house are precisely what they were when the
boy-worshiper stood in the early morning
light waiting for the sun to peer over its roof
and kindle his altar-fire. This house, in the
Goethes’ time, was occupied by the family
Von Ochsenstein, whose sons were Wolf-
gang’s playmates.

The last years of Goethe’s residence at
home, before he accepted the invitation of the
Grand Duke of Saxe- Weimar, were those
of his early fame as the author of “ Goetz ”
and “ Werther,” and his growing reputation
brought many new elements into the family
life. Everybody of distinction, especially
of literary distinction, who came to Frank-
fort, sought the acquaintance of Goethe,
and the stately house in the Hirschgraben
was enlivened by visitors of many qualities,
who were received with a formal but gener-
ous hospitality. The old Rath did his best
to preserve a polite silence when sentiments
were uttered which shocked all his precon-
ceptions, while the mother won all hearts by
her good-nature, jollity, and sound common
sense. The departure of the poet for Wei-
mar made no very great change in this re-
spect; the admirers of the poet came to
pay their respects to his parents, and a visit
to Goethe’s mother, especially, was looked
forward to as an honor and a pleasure.
The house came to be generally known
among Goethe’s friends as the Casa Santa,
a name it probably first received from Wie-
land.

In 1779, the poet came himself, bringing
with him his friend, the Grand Duke of Saxe-
Weimar. Nobles, trades-people, and hotel-
keepers were open-mouthed with wonder at
seeing a Grand Duke dwelling in a simple
citizen’s house. But the disappointment of
the father that his son had not followed the
path of a jurist, for which he had drilled him
during his boyhood, was, perhaps, amply
made up for when the son returned home
a Privy-Councillor ( Geheim-Rath ), and
brought a Grand Duke to Frankfort as his
guest.

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