Read Online The Marquise of O and Other Stories by Heinrich von Kleist - Free Book Online

confession to Friedrich von Trota in the prison scene puts Trota to the ultimate test of the lover’s faith in his beloved, a subtle personal parallel to the public trial by ordeal he has undergone already. At first, overwhelmed by the monstrous contradiction between what he unquestioningly believed to be true and what now presents itself as true, that faith momentarily collapses and he faints, as the Marquise fainted when the midwife declared her to be pregnant, or Elvira when ‘Colino’ confronted her. But he recovers, and passes the test in which Gustav von der Ried had failed. He uttersthe words which sum up Kleist’s whole conviction of the limitations of rationalism, urging Littegarde to hold fast at all costs to her inner intuitive feeling that she is innocent, notwithstanding all the indications to the contrary and notwithstanding even the apparently contrary divine pronouncement. This point of crisis and positive faith having been reached, Kleist (or God) can proceed to the vindication of Littegarde on the basis of evidence: the mystery is not an irrational one at all; the narrator has the key to it all the time, as in
The Marquise of O
—, and therefore, like that story,
The Duel
does not end tragically. The difference between the two stories is that in
The Duel
the solution is not shared all along with the reader, to whom the narrative therefore presents itself with tension and tragic potential. Unlike Count F—, even Rotbart himself does not know the real explanation of what has happened, and nor does anyone else until the very end when it is discovered accidentally – or rather (in terms of the story’s medieval Christian frame of reference) revealed by God in his own time. On the night of the murder the Count has in fact been received at Auerstein Castle, but not by Littegarde as he fondly imagines; her maid-in-waiting, an abandoned mistress of Rotbart, has deceived the latter by impersonating Littegarde, in whom she knows him to be interested, has stolen her lady’s ring and given it to him, taking him in the darkness of the night to a sumptuous bedroom in a deserted wing of the castle. And in fact Rotbart has nevertheless been responsible for the murder of Duke Wilhelm, having employed a henchman to shoot him down; but in stating that he was with Littegarde on the night in question he has been in good faith. The real and paradoxical outcome of the duel therefore turns out to be entirely appropriate: Trota recovers from his seemingly mortal wound, while Rotbart dies slowly and horribly from his slight scratch, which has turned gangrenous. Informed of the maid Rosalie’s spiteful deception of him, he makes as he dies a publicconfession which at the last moment saves the lovers from being burnt at the stake for blasphemy, and the Emperor orders a modification of the statute about trial by ordeal: a clause is to be inserted indicating that this procedure will reveal the truth immediately ‘if it be God’s will’. If it is not his will, then presumably he will reveal it later. But does Kleist here imply that this later revelation will always, as in the case of Friedrich and Littegarde, be in time to prevent a miscarriage of temporal justice? Perhaps not; but if not, then ironically enough the whole ordeal procedure ceases to be reliable, and the conclusion of
The Duel
cannot be said to be unequivocally optimistic. In the last resort the inscrutability of God’s ways must be accepted; he cannot be magically compelled to answer questions. At best (as Kleist had suggested in 1806) the world is governed by a being who is ‘not understood’; and the presumptuous claim to understand him can be raised by those who are guided by nothing more than their own cruel passions, with the terrible consequences which
The Earthquake in Chile
makes manifest.
    The world of all these stories is an unpredictable one, a world of dislocated causality on which inexplicable