Leopold Andrian, The Garden of Knowledge (1895): A New Translation

Abstract

There was once a prince of some lands bordering on Germany who, when he was twenty years old or so, married a beautiful woman. He was very different from her, but she loved this difference in him, alluring mystery full of promise that it was, one that she believed sooner or later would wonderfully reveal itself. In the second year of their marriage, she bore him a son who resembled her more with every day that went by. Time passed, and, remaining as they did very different from each other, the hope which had nourished her love began to wane. Ten years later the prince fell ill, and as his end drew nigh, when his bracelet became too large for his wrist and his rings too large for his fingers, his face changing with each passing week, she felt again that uneasy love that she had once had for him, without, however, the hope that had formerly accompanied it, knowing as she did that he would shortly die. When the prince did then die, she thought that it was his death alone that had prevented the mystery from being revealed to her. And she mourned for him. Her son, Erwin, though, had her hands and voice, and the very sound of his voice both disturbed and assuaged the fulsomeness of her pain. And so it was that she sent him to boarding school.